And, in kind of an “in your face” move, he built many of them just down the block from existing Piggly Wiggly stores - sometimes right across the street from them. But without a street sign or an address visible, I can’t do much - especially since Saunders managed to unveil eight Sole Owner stores in his first year of operation. I wish I could tell you exactly where this particular store was located you probably know how obsessive I am about such things. As you can see here (right), the buildings weren’t especially fancy on the outside, with simple hand-painted signs in the windows, but they certainly spent a lot of time and trouble on their window displays, even if it was just boxes of Brillo pads or White House rice. The Lauderdale Archives is fortunate to hold several vintage photos of several early Sole Owner locations. This was complicated for city directories of the day, I might point out, which simply listed the properties as “Clarence Saunders Stores.” The odd name stuck with shoppers, though, who knew them as “Sole Owner” stores, and that’s how he promoted them, in ads that he ran in newspapers, high-school yearbooks, and pretty much anywhere there was ink on paper. On North McLean, the top corners of an old building carry white stone shields inscribed "CSSO" - indicating this was once a Clarence Saunders Sole Owner grocery. He just needed to remind people he was still Clarence Saunders.Īnd so it was that the new groceries were given the very unusual name of “Clarence Saunders: Sole Owner of My Name” and by June 1924, he had already opened four of them across town. Well, as it turns out, Saunders decided he didn’t need to mention his former stores. How easy it would be for Clarence Saunders to promote his new business as the creator of Piggly Wiggly.” My pal Mike Freeman, author of Clarence Saunders and the Founding of Piggly Wiggly, explains that the new owners of Piggly Wiggly knew Saunders would immediately start a new - and competing - grocery chain: “His name was inevitably linked in the public mind with self-service and Piggly Wiggly. So when the Wall Street lawyers took away his nationwide chain of grocery stores, they also thought that his name came with the buy-out. You have to understand, first of all, that Saunders employed very bizarre advertising, always putting his full name in the ads, and sometimes not even mentioning Piggly Wiggly at all. Well, let me see if I can make sense of that for you. But did he no longer “own” his own name?īy 1927, he operated 220 stores in 15 states, with total sales approaching $25 million - an astonishing sum in those days. The main thing is, by 1924 Saunders no longer owned the grocery chain he founded. Uh, what? If you can explain “shorts” and “bears” then I’m very happy for you. The additional time meant a flood of stock poured from distant points and gave the ‘shorts’ opportunity to deliver.” In fact, here is how the Wall Street Journal summed it up: After explaining that speculators in 1923 had made a “run” on Saunders’ stocks, the WSJ wrote, “Reassured by the ‘bears,’ the New York Stock Exchange declared a ‘corner’ existed, and gave the ‘bears’ five days rather than 24 hours to deliver the stock Saunders had bought. The loss of Piggly Wiggly is so complicated that it almost defies explanation. When Saunders lost his millions in a convoluted stock-market takeover that cost him his Piggly Wiggly chain, he simply started over and rebuilt his enterprise with different grocery stores. When my family drained our bank accounts because of a series of ill-conceived investments, we stayed home and sulked. Anyone driving by can see that it’s obviously a cheap, gaudy imitation of the Lauderdale Mansion, with specific instructions given to the architects to make the roofline three feet higher, just to top us. Then there was that petty matter of his so-called Pink Palace. Not to mention the success of our chain of sno-cone parlors. His long-running feud with the Lauderdales has been well-documented, prompted by his childish jealousy over our fortune and social standing. But I don’t like talking about Clarence Saunders. Dear Vance: Everyone knows that Clarence Saunders invented the first self-service grocery store, Piggly Wiggly, but I’ve come across ads and references to something called “Clarence Saunders: Sole Owner of My Name Stores.” What were those? - D.K., Memphisĭear D.K.: Oh sure, he created the supermarket. Judging from the window display, rice was a big seller at this Sole Owner store.
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