Believe it or not, many years ago, except for the display in the store window, everything you wanted to buy in a store was behind a counter. And you were not allowed back there. Somewhere along the way this basic principle got lost and we turned retail stores inside out, giving customers free access to the stockroom while putting employees where the customers used to be. The results have been a disaster. As any perusal of an aisle in a Home Depot will demonstrate.
It seems like there were fewer choices before.
Piggly Wiggly invented the modern store.
Seems like the modern concept of a retail store with stocked shelves worked fine for the better part of a century. It didn’t start to fail until recently, and mostly in blue areas. So I’m not sure the stores are to blame but rather the shoppers.
That said, maybe Service Merchandise was ahead of its time.
the self shopping really boomed in WW2 when the stores lost
60% of their staff. Men to the military and women to the war industries.