Know how you can tell if you are in a genuine, old time country store? Answer: the counter will be in the back of the store where the clerk would take and fill your order for you. (Today’s version of this is a drug store where the pharmacy is in the back and you tell the pharmacist what you want or need for him/her to retrieve it for you.)
So just when and how did all of that customer service change? Glad you asked because I recently learned that we have none other than the Piggly Wiggly folks to thank for making grocery and supplies’ shopping easier and quicker. This is from the Piggly webpage:
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| About Us | Piggly Wiggly |
Now that we got all of that clarified, how about the real question everybody wants to know – “Hey Clarence, how’d you come up with a name like Piggly Wiggly?” Again, this from their website:
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| About Us | Piggly Wiggly |
Clarence sounds like he was quite a character as this article called him “a bit of an iconoclast” and discussed some of his early marketing ploys to start and expand his business (click here.) He built up the Piggly Wiggly empire to include over 2,600 stores at its peak but he then lost it all due to some stock marketing moves that backfired on him. His was a classic example of that old saying that a pig gets fat but a hog gets butchered. (That this saying pertains doubly so for a dude who named his business Piggly Wiggly seems like some kind of karma came a callin’ wouldn’t you say? Clarence became involved in some stock scheme that resulted in him losing everything and him having to sell his stores along with a mansion in Memphis that he was building at the time (click here.)