The supermarket gives us every product we want all year long at low prices.

We take it for granted today, but a century ago this miraculous way of shopping was inconceivable.

How did we get there?

I think you really have to go back.

(hip-hop music) ♪ (traffic whirs) ♪ (Shane) Few people know more about the supermarket or how we shopped before it than journalist Ben Lorr.

At the card table, he plays his hand close to the chest.

But for his best-selling history of the grocery store, he went all in.

♪ (bell jingling) (Ben) All right, here we are.

-Good morning, sir.

-Hey.

-How’s it going?

-Hey, man.

How’s it going?

(Ben) Uh, we’re looking for some skirt steak.

(butcher) Skirt steak.

(Shane) We spent the morning sampling Brooklyn’s delis and butchers.

(mellow music) (Ben) This is, like, really my happy place in the neighborhood.

(Shane) Yeah, this is the sweet spot.

♪ -It’s just, like, super chewy.

-Mm.

♪ Wow.

♪ Today, this kind of specialty shopping is a luxury enjoyed by people with plenty of time and money.

But a hundred years ago, everyone shopped like this.

The supermarket, a single store that sold everything you needed, didn’t exist.

♪ (Ben) Cheers.

(Shane) Cheers, my friend.

(laughing) Mm.

(Ben) The pre-grocery store was very disaggregated.

You would go to the butcher, you would go to the general store for dry goods, and you would go to the baker.

(Shane) At the turn of the 20th century, you could spend your whole day tackling your grocery list.

But a series of small innovations began to change the way we shop.

(Ben) Canning comes online, glassmaking.

We start using cardboard for packaging.

Now you got these smaller packages and they just kind of call out for a brand.

(projector clicks) This creates a huge shift.

Products have an individual identity and you can play them off each other.

(Shane) These small changes paved the way for something big.

♪ In 1916, a man named Clarence Saunders opened America’s first self-serving store, a Piggly Wiggly in Memphis.

♪ His idea was to cut labor costs by requiring shoppers to select their own goods.

But customers actually preferred this new freedom of choice.

His sales skyrocketed, and competitors took note.

And then, there was this gentleman, Michael Cullen, in 1930.

Basically, he just says, "We can take this setup where people can touch the goods, and we can supersize it."

(hip-hop music) ♪ By kind of both physically blowing up the footprint of the store and also cutting down on staff, what we can do is reduce price and just make up that difference in total profit based on the volume of goods.

And this is-- this is the supermarket.

And it transforms everything.

(soft music) (Shane) When Cullen opened his first store, he simply listed his prices in a four-sheet advertisement.

People couldn’t believe their eyes and drove hundreds of miles to see if it was true.

(Ben) The supermarket kind of just takes off from there, and it becomes a game of how much bigger can we make this footprint?

(Shane) As they grew, supermarkets added fresh produce, bakeries, and butchers.

Before long, you could buy everything you needed in one trip.

Today, there are more than a million supermarkets globally.

For many of us, they feel commonplace, but they reveal something profound about what we value.

(Ben) Boil it all down and there’s just two messages, loud and clear: convenience and low price.

We care about that more than just about everything.

(mellow music)