Ben Gilbert: observation

Transcript context

…Yep. Alright, so let's talk about supermarkets, listeners. I did a brief history of supermarkets in America to come up to speed on what Trader Joe's does differently and how we got here. So, you go way back, all the way to pre-Civil War America, and you've got general stores. We all have this loose idea of what this looks like. You've got one counter; there's a bunch of goods that you can see, but it's not self-served. You don't get to go pick up any goods yourself. The employee of the general store, or more than likely the owner, is just going to be the person who fetches it for you and then checks you out. That is kind of the retail experience in America, pre-Civil War. Then there's this series of innovations that advanced from this to the grocery store. So the first is the box, the cardboard box. And specifically, pre-cut corrugated cardboard boxes happened in the 1890s. It's rigid, it's cheap, and it enables shipping at scale. So suddenly, you can have regular shipments in predictable quantities inexpensively between producer and retailer. That's puzzle piece number one. Then you've got the flat-bottomed paper bag. That had happened a little bit before in the Civil War. They used to use cotton bags. But it's in short supply because you need cotton for the soldiers. And so, necessity is the mother of invention. We get the brown paper bag. You have canning. Before this, you only had glass; it would break, it was fragile, it was expensive. Suddenly, you can use tin, and you can manufacture this at scale. You can keep goods fresh for a long period of time. It's durable. And again, it's in this easy-to-manufacture, fixed-quantity size. You then get cardstock. This enables real consumer packaged goods like cereal, cracker boxes. That's still most food today. Or most food sold in supermarkets.…

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