Word: supermarketing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Most shoppers and most shopkeepers still hew to this ancient system, but a rapidly increasing number of Italian housewives have allowed themselves to be liberated. The liberator: the American-style supermarket...
Rockefeller Revolution. Italians said the supermarket could never succeed, and for long years the arguments sounded convincing: the housewife would never surrender the personal pleasure of bargaining down prices with the neighborhood shopkeeper, maids would not forego their leisurely gossip sessions in the marketplace, clerks and customers would steal the counters bare (as they did in a small-scale experiment with a self-service store in Milan in 1949). But after Romans stampeded the big U.S. supermarket set up under the direction of Grand Union's President Lansing P. Shield at an international food congress in Rome...
Better than Brynner. For the ordinary Italian family the supermarket still has drawbacks. Unlike the small shops, the supermarkets do not give credit or make home deliveries. Most Italian housewives cannot afford imported foods, cannot take home much food on a motor scooter, and do not have a refrigerator to store the food at home. Nonetheless, shopkeepers located near supermarkets complain that their business is down a third. Even Communist housewives have ignored the Red complaint that "Rockefeller is strangling the food merchants...
Last week, as he contemplated licensing still another supermercato over the protests of the Reds and the merchants, Milan's Mayor Virgilio Ferrari said: "It doesn't matter to me that those whom people call supercapitalists are running this business. What matters is that people pay less." (Supermarket prices average about 10% below those in the shops.) From a Milan housewife came even more heartfelt praise. Said she: "I enjoy a trip to the supermarket more than seeing Yul Brynner in the movies...
...Dunkirk, N.Y., police said they caught Samuel Miller hiding in a parked panel truck, taking telescopic movies of a supermarket manager working the store's combination safe...