A friend of mine recently posted that he was “Really, really tired of the phrase ‘the new normal.’” I am too — and in part because as an anthropologist I am wary of classifying anything as normal, new or not, because as humans we tend to consider our own experience “normal” and we also tend to have short memories, even of our own experiences.
I’ve been thinking about how some of what we are considering “new” in our COVID-19 world is in fact not so new. The way many people are shopping for food is not the same as it was a few months ago. They place an order and pick it up, or have it delivered. But in fact, wandering the aisles of a grocery store and inspecting different brands of rice or thumping our own watermelons is in itself a relatively recent phenomenon.
Food markets are not new — individual sellers gathering in a central place displaying and selling their products goes back to before we have written records. In the west, consolidating the various vendors into a supply chain for a single seller, such as a general store was a phenomenon that began in the 18th century as an efficiency for remotely populated areas and this type of store quickly spread and grew.
In 1870, a shopper would have gone to the store with a list (or sent a servant) and the owner or an employee would find the items, box them up and hand them over — or even deliver them. Starting to sound familiar? The model provided control for the owner, especially over inventory. There is much less risk of shrinkage due to theft when you are tightly controlling who has access to the goods.
However, providing enough staff to find, measure, weigh, and package the goods on behalf of customers had its own costs. Clarence Saunders figured that the cost savings of self service outweighed the risk, and opened the first Piggly Wiggly store in Memphis, Tennessee in 1916. While customers were confused at first, they quickly took to controlling what they put in their cart, and the chain (and soon many others) quickly expanded.
Self service as a method of saving money on staff has continued to grow as technology has developed to enable people to not only serve themselves but to check out and pay without cashiers. This has also been a boon during our time of enforced restricted contact, with even a butcher figuring out how to supply a wary public that doesn’t want to go to a grocery store but still wants control of what they purchase without the intermediary of Instacart.
The themes of cost and control figured into the rise of other self service models as well. I am eagerly awaiting the reopening of my local library, which I expect will phase in with an “order ahead and pick up” model. Like grocery pick up and delivery, the process harks back to the majority of library history, when librarians and clerks were the only people allowed in the hallowed stacks. Patrons would request specific books (or scrolls, libraries have a long history) and wait for them to be delivered — and then often be restricted to reading them in a supervised environment. Even lending libraries did not allow direct access to the stacks until the late 19th century.
While early reformers such as John Cotton Dana and James Duff Brown instituted open access as a way of democratizing knowledge, the explosion of self service libraries really came from a desire to save costs. The Carnegie Libraries, funded by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, started having open shelf policies in 1898 in order to reduce staff and associated operating costs. As with the food stores, the loss of some books was seens as a lower risk and cost than that of staffing. Nonetheless, the end result was the greater access to books by a large swath of the public.
Innovation comes in all forms, and is driven by a variety of needs, some arguably more noble than others, some arguably more critical to our health and safety. But our connection to each other and our shared past, while not discounting the importance of “new,” reminds us that sometimes it is also good to look to what has worked in the past.