There was a moment in the 1970s when somebody in Minnesota asked a question nobody in grocery had asked seriously.
What if we just stopped doing most of it?
Stop stocking shelves neatly and leave the product in the shipping cartons. Stop bagging groceries and let customers do it. Stop the carpet, the music, the soft lighting. Concrete floor, high ceiling, pallets on the sales floor.
Pass the savings through as prices dramatically lower than a conventional supermarket.
That was the warehouse grocery format, and it worked so well that it reshaped American food retail.
It also got copied by everybody, which is the whole story.
Because an idea that good does not stay yours, and what happens next to the company that invented it is one of the more instructive things in retail.