Yes! In the olden days, a customer would go to the front desk of the general store and present the clerk with a shopping list, the clerk would go to the shelves and pick the items and bring them to the front desk for the customer to purchase.
Customers didn’t prowl the store, the clerk knew exactly where everything was located and was much quicker than any customer could ever be.
The down side was there wasn’t much in the way of impulse buying, but who had excess cash anyway?
Piggly Wiggly got the customers herded into a serpentine path that went by every shelf and product, that boosted sales in a time when Godly customers remembered ‘Thou shall not steal’.
Then customers were finally trained to use a shopping cart and it was off to the races!
In Costa Rica, they have ‘Supermercados’. But they are different in that in every aisle there are two or three employees to help you find what you’re looking for. I have no doubt that if they see you putting stuff in your pockets, the armed guards (and like any place in CR where there’s money there will be armed guards) will show you the errors of your ways. They take theft pretty seriously down there and extreme measures—razor wire, broken glass on walls, & heavily armed guards—to prevent it.