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A supermarket is a store or market that sells a wide variety of goods including food and drinks, drugs, clothes, and other household products that are consumed regularly. It is often part of a chain that owns or controls (sometimes by franchise) other supermarkets located in the same or other towns; this increases the opportunities for economies of scale. Supermarkets usually offer products at low prices by reducing margins. To maintain a profit supermarkets attempt to make up for the low margins with a high volume of sales. Customers usually shop be putting their products into trolleys (shopping carts) or baskets and pay for the products at the check-out.
A larger full-service supermarket combined with a department store is known as a hypermarket. Other services that supermarkets may have include cafés, creches, photo development, pharmacies, and/or gas stations (some markets may require a membership card to purchase gas).
The concept of a self-service grocery store was developed by Clarence Saunders and his Piggly Wiggly stores, and A&P was the most successful of the early chains, having become common in American cities in the 1920s.
However, the first true supermarket was opened by ex-Kroger employee Michael J. Cullen, in 1930 in a 6,000 square foot former garage in Jamaica, Queens, New York. The store, titled King Kullen, following King Kong, operated under the slogan "Pile it high. Sell it low." When Cullen died in 1936, there were fifteen stores in operation.
Supermarkets proliferated along with suburban areas after World War II. Supermarkets in the USA are now often found matched with department stores in strip malls and are generally regional rather than national.
It was formerly common for supermarkets to give trading stamps.
In Britain, Denmark and other European countries the proliferation of out-of-town supermarkets has been blamed for the disappearance of smaller, local grocery stores and for increased dependency on the motor car.
Supermarkets typically sell many different types of items, such as:
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