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Bridget Salmon and Andrew Godley, "The Making of the Modern Supermarket: Self-Service Adoption in British Food Retailing, 1950-1975" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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A
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B
Welcome New Books Network.
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C
Hello and welcome to New Books Network. I'm your host, Bernardo Batis.
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B
Lasso.
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C
Today we're discussing the making of the modern supermarket Self Service Adoption in British Food Retailing, 1950-1975. Published in 2025 by Oxford University Press. Co authored by Andrew Goodley, professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Sussex Business School and Bridget Salmore Salman Torrey, former Archivist at Jsenberg plc. With us today is Andrew Goodley, whose work focuses on the historical and economic dynamics of entrepreneurship and the development of entrepreneurial ecosystems. Business history and economic history. Goodley earned his Bachelor of Science and doctorate from the London School of Economics and Political Science, Good completing his doctoral studies in 1993. After an early career and a very long career at the Rear Steel Reading where he served as professor of Management and Business History and pro Dean of Resources and Partnerships, he moved to Sussex Business School. He also holds visiting academic positions at Saint Han University and Wharton School and Center for Advanced Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. The Making of the Modern Supermarket is a book that is more about shopping. It's about technology, management, urban planning and consumer behavior and how everyday routines like buying food were quite transformational in post war Britain. So Andrew, thank you very much for joining us today.
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B
Well, thank you. Thank you very much, Bernardo. I'm really delighted. It gave me the opportunity to go back and reread the book, which I haven't done. I mean we don't reread our stuff right when, when it's out and, and I was quite pleased. That's not always the, the response I get when I reread my stuff. But I was quite pleased. It was good.
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C
No, it was a very, it's a very interesting book and it's Bridget's PhD which has been turned into a book and that requires a double or triple effort. But it was quite long time in the making from what you, from what you say in the introduction. So you know how did the ideas evolve or mature? And, I mean, there's a little bit about how Salmon Bridget approached you and then you started to come up with a project. And since I'm not sure if she was still at the archive, employer at the Archive at the time where she started, but probably there was some sort of negotiation with the company or not. So how was that process?
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B
Yeah, well, let me. I think we'll probably. We'll cover this sober for the next few minutes. And it's quite complicated, but it's also very much driven by who Bridget is as a person. Bridget joined Sainsbury's as their archivist in 1982. She was young, she was just bubbly, full of enthusiasm, super excited. If you were to ever meet her, you would see these qualities in her. The archive had just been established, it had just been founded a couple of years before, but it was there, it was for her to develop. Indeed, she sort of created this mandate to be able to build this archive within the organization and to take it forward and to do with it really whatever she wanted. And so over the following 20 odd years, she just really used the archive to transform a lot of the wedding. With the restraint, the company began to. Stone history and then to utilize it internally. Now. So if you talk to the books, we Archive status within the history of the company and within the, you know, anyone associated with the archive, the remaining members of the family. So during the 1980s, towards the early 1990s, they asked Bridget to write a corporate history. And that came out in 1993, and it was dominated by what was known about the archive at that time. But it was during that time that she started to get these little hints about the story of the move towards the Sainsbury supermarket. So the book that came out in 1993 didn't really cover that at all. And the archive at that point didn't really cover much of that. But she went around gathering papers, knocking on doors and picking up boxes, shuffling through things, and began to sort of piece together this story that nobody had known about Sainsbury's move to. To becoming what by that point was obviously was one of the leading companies in the country and one of the leading supermarket retailers. So it really is a book that is the product of her work. Not just as, you know, an archivist, but as someone who created and curated that archive. And. And then she came to me, I suppose, I don't know, end of the 1990s, 2000s, I got to know her and we started talking about it. She decided she wanted to do a Ph.D. that was very much focused on just trying to unpack the archival record. And so it was very much focused on the Sainsbury's story. She did a bit of work for me as a research assistant on a different project, but then sadly became really quite ill with a debilitating eye illness and wasn't able to proceed. And so she came to me, let's say two, three years ago, so probably the end of 2022, and said, you know, this book, this draft book, this PhD with a few little scribbles on, was either going to go in the bin or could I write it? Could I take her scribbles, her PhD transcript, and turn it into a book? And so that was my challenge, really. My challenge was to be able to kind of use what she'd produced, which was very much focused on Sainsbury's, very much the sort of documentary record of her curation of the archival record of this period and turn it into something that would be a scholarly contribution to the history of retailing and food distribution in this period. It was very much a labor of love for her to be able to get it to that point. She was devastated that she just, you know, she just was, was disabled, blind, unable to complete the project and so passed it on to me. And it was a, you know, sort of. I knew because I knew the literature, I knew the book contained what, what. What would be a really significant contribution to the literature. And so I had this sort of great responsibility to be able to take what she gave me and to spend a considerable amount of time and, and turn it into what it became.
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C
Excellent. It's a beautiful story. And some of that, as I said, comes out in the introduction. But before we dig deep into the book, how common is for retailers to have archives? And if it's uncommon, why did Sainsbury's decided to have a corporate archive?
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B
Okay, so it's not so uncommon that retailers have got archives. What is uncommon is that amongst those group of retailers in the uk, the food retailers that went on to become the big retailers, whether that's the big four, the Big six, whatever it was, the ones that grew to become the dominant supermarket food retailers, those companies have left relatively little archival record. Partly that was almost a matter of policy. Marks and Spencer, for example, which came to food retailing fairly late in their history, it was traditionally just in overwhelming clothing variety stores. Their archive was. Their records were binned as they went along, so that they just deliberately had this policy of not keeping papers so unlike banks or insurance has no reason to keep records. So any kind of lien management disposition would mean that companies would get rid of records. Where there were changes in management, senior management, a lot of acquisitions and changes of ownership, then that would often lead to disposals of paperwork, meaning mostly going in the bin. The relocation of headquarters meant that there was a lot of trimming of material. So that amongst that group of companies that became the major supermarket retailers, there's a bunch of papers that are associated with what's called the Summerfield Archive, which is in the University of Essex, sorry, Exeter, which gathered together from the constituent companies by Gareth Shaw, professor of geography down there, but. But relatively few outside of that. Nothing from Tesco, for example, great admission. Nothing from Asda, nothing from Morrison, nothing on Safeway. Sainsbury's was different because, number one, it was a family firm and they stayed in the same ownership so that they gathered their papers and partly through inertia, they just were kept in place and they stayed in the same headquarters in Blackfriars all the way through this particular period. So when Bridget was going around in the mid-1980s, late 1980s, and asking for box, you know, old paperwork and stuff to put in the archive, she would be given boxes of old documents and things that had just been, you know, left in the corner of the offices for years or decades. Some of the fines, some of the most important records that we got, she found in this way that had just been left in the office because nobody had been bothered to turf them out and to bin them because there's no reason to get rid of them. So it's just really as simple a story as that.
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C
Thank you for that. Let's try to set the scene and give a little bit of context. Could you describe the British high street, as we call the main place of business in the town, before self service? And I understand that even before supermarkets, people would negotiate price and it was very discretionary the way that people were being served. So how does this evolve and what was the situation coming to the 1930s and 1940s as supermarkets appear?
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B
Yeah, I think the practice of negotiating price had probably dropped out in the 19th century, as there'd been this migration away from markets and open markets, or in the Asian practice, wet markets. There'd been a move away from that into multiple food stores, traditional multiples that specialized on particular food products, food categories like maple and tea and Lipton on tea and so on. And they'd all begun to acquire specific buildings within the high street, specific locations. And so what you had by the 1930s was a multiplicity of very specialist retailers, all of whom had their own particular niche. They all specialized in particular products. So not just greengrocers and butchers and bakers, but also these traditional multiples that would have just concentrated on a small product range of groceries. The biggest food retailers, in terms of the capitalization, the size of the organization, the geographic coverage, these were all traditional multiples that would have had product ranges of 10 or 12. They would have retailed, you know, tea and sugar, margarine, a few other things. So they were all located in relatively small stores because they had small product ranges. And so the shoppers would spend a lot of time going from shop to shop. Within each shop, they would queue at one particular counter from which they would get stuff that was from that particular department. But for example, tea and sugar would be sold at one counter and margarine and other fats from a different counter. And so shoppers would go around from within these shops, from one counter to another counter to another counter, and each one queue after queue after queue, and then they would go to different shops. So if you think about the pattern of shopping from a consumer's perspective, there's a lot of time waiting and queuing in the process of trying to buy food. In the period before the Second World War, World War II came in, obviously introduced rationing, and that was overtly a policy that overtly tried to stabilize retail structure so that it didn't want to change retail structure, didn't want to allow competitive forces to change the way firms behaved during the war. And food rationing continued after the war, one form or another, right the way through till 1954. So you had this process of calcification, of keeping things very, very inflexible right the way through until the early 1950s. So it's in that setting that self service begins to be introduced in the, you know, the very early experiments in the late 1940s and early 1950s where, where there are so many constraints on, on the ability to be able to make changes.
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C
Thank you. So how did retailers like Sainsbury's and later on Tesco and, and Morrison move from region and the Co Op, of course, move from regional food shops to national high street and suburban giants. What changed behind the scenes before customers notice anything different?
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B
That's a big question. So let me just. Can I just. I'll break that down and into what they were all like at the beginning, because I think it's really important to understand that all of those companies, they had very different Attributes and then maybe after that I'll come back to you and then you can sort of say, well, where should we go next? If that's okay. Because in, let's say 1950 you have a, a structure of food retailing which, in which the, the largest single group is the cooperatives, as you mentioned, they would. So they, we talk about the cooperative as if it's one big organization. But the retailers were lots and lots of sometimes quite small, but regional cooperative retail societies based in the outlets were based in neighborhoods as well as in the town centers. After that you had these nationwide traditional multiples like Maple, Lipton and International and others that specialized in particular product categories with very small product ranges, very small stores, but overwhelmingly down in the town centers. They grown in the Victorian and Edwardian period and they were in the urban centers. The new kids on the block in the 1930s was this group of price cutting multiples that were just focused on groceries, on dry goods, on packaged branded products. And they spotted the opportunity to be able to adopt something like the American model of self service and to undercut the competitors. And that was Tesco's and then others that we, you know, we've forgotten today, like Pricerite and Victor Value and so on. So that was that group. And then after. I haven't even talked about the independence, I'm not going to talk about that. But then there was this other group of sort of, I suppose we'd call them provisions merchants who specialized. They were in perishable products. So whether they were in dairy or whether they were in meats and hams or in fresh meats, like butchers and so on, and that there was a few regional food retailers like Sainsbury's that was based in London that incorporated a broader product range that was not particularly groceries. It wasn't these packaged branded goods, but it was more of these perishable products that were the, you know, the hams and the fresh meats and poultry and so on. So you have all of these different food retailers that have, if you like a different, you know, if we're going into the 1950s, they come into the 1950s and they come into this attempt to try and experiment with self service, but they come into it with very different legacies. Let me stop there and then you can, you can ask me where to go next.
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C
Right, so let's discuss how is it that self service is coming in as an idea and it's evolving because much of the book is precisely of how they tried to find a format for this self service. So I understand that you have these long queues and it's. And the supermarkets are offering an alternative, but they could have stopped there to some extent. No. Why is it that they want to experiment with self service? Is it coming also from the US or where is the idea coming from?
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B
So the original idea as it was being embodied by Tesco's and the, the discounters, the grocery discounters, was absolutely taken from the us. They were inspired by the original self service model that was growing quickly in the US in the 1930s and then growing even more quickly in the 1940s and the 1950s and they wanted to pursue that in the UK. Well, obviously the context was very different and you couldn't. There were no equivalent of American suburbs, there was no equivalent of the level of car ownership in American car ownership in the uk. And so the whole context of, in particular post war Britain was completely different to the United States. They couldn't just build new shops, they weren't allowed to. They had to. If they wanted to make changes, they wanted to introduce self service, then they had to take their existing stock of retail outlets and change them from counter service and convert them into self service. And so that meant that they were already working in this very constrained environment. The layout of counter service stores, if you looked at them, so we've got some plans and photographs in the book that show that, you know, if you walked into a counter service store, it was long and thin, it wasn't a particularly large footprint. You know, it would be the sort of, if you thought about the footprint of a, I don't know, a sort of a reasonable terrace house in, you know, in the town in Britain today, long and thin, then that would be your counter service store in most high streets in Britain in the 1950s. Well, supermarkets, even small supermarkets, they weren't long and thin, they were more like squares in terms of the footprint and they were bigger than counter service stores. And so the existing stock of shops that those people that were experimenting with self service, American style self service was different to the stock of space, retail space that the American pioneers and the American retailers were able to use. So they had to adapt, they had to experiment, they had to work out what was going to work in the uk. And they, the initial experiments were just very, very rudimentary, very simple, just simple as taking the shelving and the desk work that was the basis of the counter service shop. So the shelves at the back along the walls that all the produce were stored and all the groceries were stored on the desks. And so on the, the. The where the counter service staff would serve you from. They would rip those out and just put them in the center of the. The shop and the. And then let people come and just help themselves from the center and then go and pay for at a single checkout. So it was a very, very rudimentary initial experiment and, and obviously, you know, as, as restrictions by the mid. And especially into the late 1950s, as they began to relax the ability for these fledgling supermarket organizations to experiment, the scope of experimentation began to grow and they began to see what worked well with, you know, what customer response rates worked well to.
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C
Convenience is a very ill defined concept. But is this drive for self service looking for convenience, for customer convenience or for increased productivity? Because you made the argument several times trying to tie in how different formats of self service tie in to increased productivity or financial benefit for the firm.
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B
Yeah, the initial expression of self service, especially in the United States was clearly driven by the ability to be able to exploit gains in labor productivity. That was why it was then.
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C
The.
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B
Idea was received so welcome by the government with open arms in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War that they were hoping that food retailers could adopt self service, improve labor productivity and so release labor for more productive activities. And there's a great labor shortage after the Second World War. And some of the retailers did do that. They were able to exploit labor productivity gains. Co Op, great example. So one of the chapters in the book looks at particularly useful for US survey of different food retailers in the mid-1960s and compares the productivity and the capital investment of different types of food retailers and so clearly shows that labor productivity in the cooperatives was increasing. They were able to shed staff while keeping capital investment basically stable. Most of the larger multiple grocers like Tesco's and whoever else would have been included in the survey. I forget exactly. They also enhanced the labor productivity, but they were also increasing their investments, their capital investment. At the same time, what was unusual about Sainsbury's was that it was making massive investment in capital, sort of a five times greater investment in capital investment than any of the. Than the other multiples on average. But at the same time it was also increasing its staffing levels, so its labor productivity gains were zero. So that there was something strange that was going on in the Sainsbury's format, at least by the. That was the early 1960s, that particular comparison. So the labor productivity story is obviously a very attractive one. It makes a great deal of sense, you know, intuitively, theoretically. But when you drill into this variation of formats, as different companies were experimenting with it, you see quite a lot of variation of labor productivity and that the company that became the most successful, whose format then became the template during the late 1970s and 1980s for others to copy, namely Sainsbury's, actually experienced zero labor productivity gains. I'll stop there.
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C
And that's a very complex and interesting story trying to establish this causality between self service and higher turnover or higher profitability, which is probably what happens when you drill into how the process is actually working. But there is nonetheless from implicit in what you are in the story that you're telling, that management, the top management, is committed to this idea and is committed to see it through because it takes quite a long time to find the right format. Now, let me make a side question here. It's a footnote in our conversation and that has to do with something that is probably absent from this central chapters and it's the role of automation. So self services is a way to increase or to decrease labor productivity, but so did machines and particularly computers. And in other parts of the literature, retailers have been criticized for being very low or very slow, sorry, takers of technology. Is it something to do with self service in the sense of trying to find the right format for the store before finding other ways to increase productivity? And it's only until maybe Walmart comes along in the 1980s that there is this big boom of computerization in the, in the retail sector. And I take it that it might not be necessarily your interest or part of the story that you wanted to tell and more of the sort of thing that makes me wake up in the morning.
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B
Yeah, and I appreciate this is one of your special interests. And so I'm going to be quite careful in couching my response in terms of exactly what, what we do know. I mean, what we do know is that Sainsbury's purchased one of these mainframe computers from EMI and Emudex. I imagine it was a joint venture with the American company DEC in 1961. We know that before that in the 1950s, they were already using punch cards for reordering produce in the branches. So the conventional narrative about retailers being relatively slow to move to computerization, it may well be true, but the case study that I know well then is an outlier. But then everything that we know about the way that it developed self service suggests that it was a bit of an outlier. So it wouldn't be inconsistent that it also was an organization that was in advance of the rest of the retailing sector. In moving to an early adoption of computer technology. We know that the second non family member to have a full board position was the statistician and pioneer of computer software usage, computer usage in organizations, Bernard Ram. So that was in 1962. So his rise to prominence was associated with this increasing value of statistical analysis within the organization, within the firm. So that tells us that there was. Despite it being a family firm, despite it being privately owned, despite family being very prominent within the running, the day to day running of the organization, the family itself had this strong appreciation of professional management professionalization, this willingness to be able to promote the professional managers that were highly competent to senior positions, which I mean that then is starting to tell you that they were as an organization were departing away somewhat from the conventional narrative of post war British business. Family run business that was becoming increasingly complacent and finding itself increasingly unproductive. I'll stop there.
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C
Thank you for that. You suggest that competition between counter services and self service formats matter more than competition between different ownerships or governance models. Would that be a fair reading of your argument? Yeah.
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B
I did have, I'd written something down about that and I'm just trying to find it, but I can't. So I think that the argument of the book is that, and I'm sure we'll get onto this, was that customers preferred self service and increasingly they voted with their feet by moving and taking their shopping purchases to a particular kind of self service which was an increasingly larger store with an increasingly bigger product range, something that became known as one stop shopping and so being able to buy their food items less frequently and with a bigger basket size at each visit. So that's taking us quite a long way away from counter service. There are several different kind of iterations of experiments with self service and small supermarkets and supermarkets with different types of product ranges. Supermarkets that had different combinations of foods and non foods, Tesco's at this times and Asda and the other ones, they had food product ranges that were relatively small and then non food product ranges that were much bigger. Tesco sold furniture and houseware and stuff. So that was a very. To us nowadays that seems very odd. And then within the supermarkets you then had these other supermarkets that sold overwhelmingly food, very little non food products, but within the food category more and more perishables as opposed to non perishable products. So what you've got is you've got this spectrum of format types that are all covered by the self service and supermarket terminology, but which look very different to each other. And they're all increasingly moving further and further away from the counter service format. Now, that process, if we say that the initial experiments with self service were in the, I don't know, in the early 1950s, mid-1950s, and there's this sort of late 1950s, early 1960s experimentation with what became then the very early supermarkets. And so this realization after some sort of competitive shakeout in the very early 1960s, 1962, 1963, this realization by the mid-1960s that the format that is going to be successful is one which is based in these larger supermarket sizes, four or five times in the supermarket sizes of the late 1950s, and that they would have more and more of the perishable foods and a wider product range covering more and more foods, not worry too much about the non foods. But it was this wide product range of food products that people could get their pretty much the whole of their weekly needs at this one store, in this one shop. So the competition, it wasn't so much. So you can't just say it's counter service versus self service. It was this sort of, you know, going through one format innovation after another, format innovation to another form of innovation. The format wasn't just about how the shops looked, whether it was counter service or self service or size. It was about the product range and the category of products within the product range.
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C
And some of the arguments that you put in the book, and again during our conversation for me, echo the distinction that Alfred Chandler makes between being pioneers and first movers. So would it be fair to say that according to you, Sainsbury's success lay not in being first, but in being organizationally and strategically better prepared.
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B
Prepared, identified. I mean, they had a better. Okay. I mean, let's come back to where all of these different companies were starting from. And the advantage that Sainsbury's had over all of the others was that in order for them to be able to be successful in self service, they had to be able to figure out how to do the self service of fresh meat. Now, that was really difficult because it's so perishable. That requires an infrastructure, what we now call a cold chain that allows the meat to be taken from the abattoir through to households in a sufficiently short period of time before it goes off. That is so difficult to do that. I mean, you compare that with the kind of Tesco and early fine fare model of just having tins and packets, dry goods that have this very long shelf life, they don't go off. They can just, you put them on the shelf and then you forget about it, you know, much more like modern Aldi or a Lidl type thing where the perishable side of the product range is much less than in Waitrose or Sainsbury's today, let's say.
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C
So, so to what extent is Sainsbury getting things right as opposed to being the first one?
- [42:09]
B
So they had this much more complex product range to begin with. If they wanted to do self service and they were committed to self service, they said this is going to be the future, this is what we've got to do. So it took them a long time to figure out how to be able to create the infrastructure, create the level of refrigeration, the cold chain that was required for that, the way in which it was going to be packaged and distributed. But of course, once they've done that, then extending the product range in their self service stores to groceries, to, you know, these packaged goods and tins, I mean that's easy. That's really easy. You compare that then with Fine Fair and Tesco that came from the background of specializing in figuring out how to put boxes and tins onto shelves and let people go through and pick them up and pay for them. And then the problem that they've got is how do you then extend a product range into perishable products like fresh meat? That then is a much, much more difficult journey for the pioneers to take. So the first movers, I mean they would have been great if they'd have stayed in their lane and carried on just doing groceries. But consumers didn't want that, they wanted the full range. And so what that meant was that those companies that had figured out how to do self service at scale imperishable products, but took longer to figure out than how to do self service in simple grocery branded packaged goods, they were then the ones that were able to extend their product range into groceries and packaged goods. And that was much easier. So of course there's a logic in terms of the length of time that it takes to solve complicated problems is longer than the length of time it takes to solve simple problems. And so your first movers are the ones that figured out how to solve the simple problems of self service. The second movers like Sainsbury's were the ones that first, because of their initial starting point with perishable products and fresh meat, they needed to figure out a more complicated problem. But once they'd figured it out, then the rest of rolling out the self service across a bigger product range was relatively easy for them.
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C
If Listeners were to take away one big insight from the book. What would it be? Is it about technology, consumers, management, or something else?
- [44:55]
B
I think it's all of that. I think that. So we're talking about a very, very complex social innovation. Yes, of course there's a technological side to this. Yes, of course there's a managerial side to this. But actually, in the process of trying to learn what it was that customers would respond to and how they would respond to it with sufficient demand that it made the investments worthwhile, that took a lot of effort, a lot of thinking, a persistent. You know, there were enough senior retailers that were characterized by inertia. The ones that were able to continue to push forwards were the ones that continually reflected and thought about what they were doing and how they could do it better. So it was very complicated. It required a set of, I think, you know, corporate culture that was committed to the product range, committed to customers and customer value and, and committed to. To change, and committed to adopting this, this new technology or this new, this new, new kind of format.
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C
Is that what the story will tell us or about today's retail transformations? Or let me be a little more blunt. What would the likes of staff at Google or Amazon or somebody that is having trouble with their format, like Walmart or Nordstrom or maybe Asda, learn from the book?
- [47:08]
B
Yeah, I mean, we know that Amazon have experimented with these, you know, people, less stores and have withdrawn from that. I think that food shopping is a. It is a social activity. I think that the consequences of that are there will always be food retailers that have actual stores that people go and visit and inspect and choose and look and compare different brands and different products and put things into trolleys. I think that the frequency of visits may well drop. I can see that the significant innovation that really has changed food retailing recently is not Amazon's attempt to have staffless stores, but is deliveries and the reversion to the 1930s norm of ordering your food and having it delivered. And I can see that in particular with drone technology, that will improve, that will increase, and that means that people will visit the stores less frequently, but they'll still visit. They'll still want to go and see what else there is. They'll still seek variety in their food basket. So what would the people charged with developing new technologies for food retailing in Google and OpenAI and Amazon and other places today take from this? I think that it's a complex social phenomenon and that the initial assumption about what drives human behavior in food shopping is not necessarily going to be correct, it's not just convenience, it's not rarely price. I mean, the price within certain bands, price is not a big discriminator. Whereas reputation for quality and reliability, all of these are very important. So yeah, like anything, you know, I mean, we love researching different aspects of business behavior and the role of technology and how that changes business behavior. And we see that through partly through the prism of success and failure and competitiveness. But that itself is the product of this interaction with customers, with society, with real people. And so is the product of this, this great social space, this social innovations that we really, in the end, that's what it is that drives our interest in this subject. We're not particularly driven just by the changing properties of technology or whatever.
- [50:35]
C
Thanks for that. So was there something that when rereading the book, or more primitive when looking through the archives, genuinely surprised you or changed your mind?
- [50:50]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think that when. So Bridget's story when she was immersed in the Sainsbury's archive was that she'd been so impressed by Sainsbury's initial experiments in self service in the early and mid-1950s and she'd assumed that Sainsbury's therefore was one of the pioneers of self service experimentation in this country. And it was really only later when we began to put together the story of what had happened with the competitors and dig into. Because this was during newspaper digital searches or digital archive searches and just putting together piece by piece of disparate data and putting it together. And we realized that actually they all experimented, they all had two or three of these early experiments in self service and that the ones that were leading in self Service in the 1950s were the CO ops and then quite a few other multiple groups that had got maybe 10 or 15 or 20 self service organizations that by 1961, outside of Finefare and Tesco, one or two others, the largest multiple in terms of the number of self service stores, it had less than 20. So it was just tiny, tiny numbers even by the end of the 1950s. So we'd been thinking that Sainsbury's was one of these pioneers, but it wasn't. It was just experimented a little bit. But by placing this in this wider context of what was then going on with the rest of the industry, we're able to really see this picture of how Sainsbury's was able to really begin to change its approach to self service from the early 1960s and develop what became these larger supermarkets based on this much bigger product range. And that then that Made everything make sense.
- [53:21]
C
Thanks for that and thanks for the time. So one final question. What is your next big project? And hopefully we can have you back here at the New Book Network.
- [53:32]
B
That's a very kind invitation. I think related to this the. So, I mean, the topic that we were unable to cover in this book is the topic that really we need to cover, which is the big criticism of the big food retailers from the end of the 1980s and into the 1990s and 2000s, which is their control of suppliers, their ability to be able to control suppliers. In particular, suppliers of fresh produce, fresh goods, meat and dairy and so on. And we didn't cover that in this book. It happened really a bit later than what we were looking at in this book, but it was starting. It started to happen in, let's say, the 1970s. It started to happen in particular in the poultry sector. As the poultry sector transitioned from frozen produce to fresh chickens. And supermarkets, Marks and Spencer's and Sainsbury's in particular began to informally introduce rules and regulations that started to control and constrain the ability of suppliers to be able to act independently and to have agency. So the next book that I'm hoping to get to later on this year, in the summer of 2026, hopefully, would be to develop my earlier work on the poultry industry and to follow that through to the 1980s and look at related sectors and see what happened and how the big supermarkets were able to extend their control over these suppliers and to explain why what was in the interest of supermarkets, that's probably obvious, but why the suppliers were willing to give them that level of control.
- [55:44]
C
I tell you, there is one supplier that they don't control, and that's the supplier of payment solutions. They don't control the banks. And I think that you have a fascinating discussion around pages 178, 194, to be precise, about the cost of handling cash versus profitability around square foot. And coming back to some of the topics that we've talked today. Banks are automating, incorporating computer technology much earlier than the banks. But it's probably something that we need to take on the side as from the bank's side, which, you know, it's very much my interest. They are expecting retailers to implement the solutions that they come up with, but at the same time, they are competing with them, not with the food retailers, but with the department stores in the introduction of credit cards and what they call the universal credit cards. So anyway, it was just a side comment on this and probably something that we need to take on with a coffee or a beer or something and have a much longer chat and hopefully something will come out of it.
- [57:10]
B
I very much look forward to that.
- [57:13]
C
I look forward to seeing you in person soon. And again, just I'm left to thank you Andrew for joining us today. This was Bernardo Batislaso for New Books Network talking to my good friend and Luke Goodley about the making of the Modern Supermarket, co authored with Bridget Salmon. If you enjoy the conversation, do subscribe to the podcast and if you are already a subscriber, please leave a comment on the blog.
- [57:50]
B
Sa.