Piggly Wiggly

 

Every time I walk into a modern supermarket, I have the vague sensation that I’m participating in a very polite psychological experiment.

Soft lighting. Strategic fruit displays. Twelve brands of the same oat milk arranged like they’re auditioning for a minimalist design magazine. And somewhere, silently judging me, a row of protein bars that taste like sweetened drywall but promise health, energy, and, in some ways, moral superiority.

Hard to imagine, but before 1916, you couldn’t wander a grocery store making questionable life choices next to the frozen waffles. You walked in, handed a clerk your list, and waited while they retrieved your food like a polite, edible library system. Sometimes they suggested things. Sometimes they judged you. Mostly they controlled the flow of the entire experience.

That was shopping.

Then along came Clarence Saunders, a grocery wholesaler in Memphis who apparently woke up one morning and thought, ‘What if we just… let people touch things?’ A radical notion. Borderline chaos. The retail equivalent of letting toddlers run a city council meeting.

Everyone thought he was ridiculous. Competitors even ran ads mocking the idea, which is comforting in a bleak sort of way. History shows that whenever something genuinely new appears, the first public response is usually laughter followed by panic, like someone spotting a chimp on an airplane.

Saunders opened his store anyway and gave it the deeply unserious name Piggly Wiggly, which sounds less like a business and more like a children’s book character. When people asked why he chose the name, he basically said, “So you’d ask”. Which, honestly, is better branding logic than most million-dollar startups manage today.

But the name wasn’t the real disruption. The layout was.

Customers entered through a turnstile, grabbed a basket, walked down aisles, saw clearly marked prices, picked whatever they wanted, and paid at the front. No middleman, just you, your list, and your impulses.

It was the first self-service grocery store in America, and within a year, Saunders was franchising. By 1923, there were more than a thousand of them.

Which means one slightly stubborn man rearranged how an entire country bought food. Not with new technology. Not with an app. Just by removing a step everyone assumed was necessary.

That part fascinates me. Because we live in an age obsessed with adding things. More features. More layers. More dashboards explaining other dashboards.

Saunders did the opposite. He took something away. And in doing so, he quietly invented impulse buying … the economic engine of late capitalism and my personal weakness around dark chocolate covered almonds. When customers had to walk past every product, they didn’t just buy what they needed. They bought what looked good, what felt comforting, what whispered, “You deserve this,” in the gentle tone usually reserved for bad decisions.

He even put candy at checkout, which is either genius merchandising or the earliest documented form of emotional manipulation, depending on how recently you’ve tried to parent a six-year-old.

The wild part is that today we’d call this “behavioral design.” We’d build a conference around it. Someone would write a book with a bright orange cover and a subtitle containing the word habit.

But a century ago, it was just a guy rearranging shelves and trusting human nature to do the rest.

That’s the lesson hiding under the nostalgia and the oddly named store: real disruption isn’t always about inventing something new. Sometimes it’s about noticing the invisible friction everyone else politely ignores.

And friction is everywhere right now.

We’ve built digital lives filled with tiny clerks: algorithms suggesting what to watch, what to read, what to think, what to want. Helpful, efficient, and faintly suffocating. Like being wrapped in a very soft, very intelligent blanket you didn’t ask for.

Convenience, we’re told, is the highest good. Faster. Easier. Smoother.

But Saunders’ story makes me wonder if we’ve misunderstood the assignment. Because convenience isn’t just about removing effort. It’s about deciding which effort matters.

He removed the clerk, but he added wandering. He removed waiting, but he added choice. He removed control, and accidentally created temptation.

That trade-off feels more honest than most modern design, which tries to erase effort entirely, as if a meaningful life should feel like scrolling through a menu that never ends and never quite satisfies.

Maybe the real rebellion now isn’t building smarter systems. Maybe it’s noticing where the friction is doing something useful: The pause before buying. The silence before speaking. The boredom before an idea. All the uncomfortable little spaces where thinking actually happens.

AI "Tells"

With everybody lathered up over detecting indications that AI was used in everything posted or published, I'm considering adding a quick parenthetical aside every time I naturally use a phrase or punctuation that signals AI use. How does this sound?

The things that used to signal craft — clarity, rhythm, structure — things you’ve been doing for years get rebranded as artificial. (Damn,  I've used an em-dash, another AI "tell")

 

You're so dumb ...

 

Back in the day, ex-partner and mentor Tom Dombrosky and I had a major client who liked to “hold court”, bringing in his management team and us (his “advertising team”) together for a weekly discussion on sales and marketing in his massive, richly appointed office.

He was one of our biggest clients, so we would dutifully show up, sit quietly, nod, and take notes as he pontificated, rarely letting anyone else speak unless they where being called out for what he liked identify as “a dumbass move that made me wonder what the fuck he was using for a brain.”

He liked Tom and me and we were seldom targeted except to back up his calling someone out by turning our direction and saying something along the lines of “Dumb as a Pollack, huh, Dombrosky?” There was no reason to respond. He was too busy laughing at his “joke”.

He was a self-centered, know-it-all bully. But we needed the billing and the prestigious name of his business on our client list.

During one of these “meetings”, Tom caught my eye and then looked down at his notebook where he had written: “If his brain was dynamite, there wouldn't be enough to blow his nose.”

I almost laughed out loud … which would have been a major faux pas by drawing attention to myself, thus setting myself up as a target.

Next week, I did the same to Tom with: “Does his asshole ever get jealous of the shit that comes out of his mouth?”

So it became a weekly thing where we would each prepare an insult that we’d use to try to make the other laugh at an inopportune time.

That was a long time ago and I can’t remember all the insults we traded … but I do know how to search the internet … so … here are a bunch insults reminiscent of those Tom and I used to share via pen and paper back in the pre-digital days:

• I see you’ve set boundaries between yourself and common sense.
  
  
• You have a unique way of speaking that makes people truly appreciate your silence.
  
  
• I truly admire your courage to speak in the vast absence of knowledge.
  
  
• You possess a mind that is completely unburdened by the complications of thought.
  
  
• As an outsider what’s your view on intelligence?
  
  
• You bring everyone so much joy when you leave the room.
  
  
• I'd call you an idiot, but that would be an insult to idiots everywhere.
  
  
• Your brain must feel so lonely, with all that empty space to itself.
  
  
• You should get two paychecks. One for what you’re worth and then another one to bring you back up to minimum wage.
  
  
• Wisdom is chasing you but God blessed you with speed.
  
  
• You look so much smarter than you are.
  
  
• You’re the type of person who would climb a glass wall just to see what was on the other side.
  
  
• I love that you don’t let facts get in the way of your opinions.
  
  
• I know you tried your best, that’s what makes it so disappointing.
  
  
• It is very hard to underestimate you.
  
  
• I’d agree with you, but then we’d both be wrong.
  
  
• Intelligence is chasing you, but you are faster.
  
  
• I love how committed you are to your limitations.
  
  
• Anytime I think I am failing in life, I remember that you exist.
  
  
• I’m trying to understand your point of view, but my frontal lobe is developed.
  
  
• Besides the obvious, what would you change about yourself?
  
  
• I envy the people who don’t know you.
  
  
• I wish I could bottle common sense and prescribe it to you in pill form.
  
  
• You’re a walking reminder that thinking is optional.
  
  
• Your learning curve must be a circle.
  
  
• A douche of your magnitude could cleanse a whale’s vagina.
  
  
• I’m trying so hard to see this from your perspective, but I can’t seem to get my head that far up my rear end.
  
  
• I brains were measured in cotton, you’d have enough to make a tampon for a flea.
  
  
• You're proof that evolution can go in reverse.
  
  
• You have so many talents that no one would think of wanting.
  
  
• If ignorance is bliss, you must be the happiest person alive.
  
  
• You're not the dumbest person on Earth, but you'd better hope that person doesn’t die.
  
  
• Whatever you're thinking, stop. It's not helping anyone.
  
  
• You're living proof that even natural selection takes a day off sometimes.
  
  
• Some drink from the fountain of knowledge. You just gargled.
  
  
• Your train of thought doesn't seem to have a station.
  
  
• You have such a unique way of misunderstanding things.
  
  
• I'd explain it slower, but I'm afraid we'd both die of old age first.
  
  
• It must be so peaceful inside your mind.
  
  
• I can explain it to you, but I cannot understand it for you.
  
  
• You're the human equivalent of a participation trophy.
  
  
• If stupidity were a currency, you'd be a billionaire.

• It must be so freeing not to be saddled with the burden of comprehension.
  
  
• I don’t want to argue with you and have to explain all the big words I have to say.
  
  
• Somewhere there’s a tree out there providing you oxygen. Find it and apologize.
  
  

Are we teaching our kids to memorize or to understand?

 

How to survive the classroom: grind through a textbook and try to memorize just enough to survive the next test.

The classroom doesn’t prepare students for the real world. Because the real world doesn’t hand out standardized exams.

Outside of school, success isn’t just about recall … it’s about understanding. If you have to memorize something, chances are you don’t really understand it yet. And when you truly understand an idea, memorization is a by-product, because you can use it, explain it, and apply it in new situations.

_________________________

NOTE: Don’t blame teachers. If they’re evaluated and paid based on standardized test scores, the system dictates the outcome: teaching to memorize, not to think.