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A supermarket, a large form of the traditional grocery store, is a self-service shop offering a wide variety of food and household products, organized into aisles. It is larger and has a wider selection than a traditional grocery store, but is smaller and more limited in the range of merchandise than a hypermarket or big-box market. The supermarket typically comprises meat, fresh produce, dairy, and baked goods aisles, along with shelf space reserved for canned and packaged goods as well as for various non-food items such as kitchenware, household cleaners, pharmacy products and pet supplies. Some supermarkets also sell a variety of other household products that are consumed regularly, such as condoms (where permitted), medicine, and clothes, and some stores sell a much wider range of non-food products: DVDs, sporting equipment, board games, and seasonal items (e.g., Christmas wrapping paper in December). The traditional supermarket occupies a large amount of floor space, usually on a single level. It is usually situated near a residential area in order to be convenient to consumers. The basic appeal is the availability of a broad selection of goods under a single roof, at relatively low prices. Other advantages include ease of parking and frequently the convenience of shopping hours that extend into the evening or even 24 hours of day. Supermarkets usually allocate large budgets to advertising, typically through newspapers. They also present elaborate in-shop displays of products. The shops are usually part of corporate chains that own or control (sometimes by franchise) other supermarkets located nearby—even transnationally—thus increasing opportunities for economies of scale. Supermarkets typically are supplied by the distribution centres of their parent companies, usually in the largest city in the area. Supermarkets usually offer products at relatively low prices by using their buying power to buy goods from manufacturers at lower prices than smaller stores can. They also minimise financing costs by paying for goods at least 30 days after receipt and some extract credit terms of 90 days or more from vendors. Certain products (typically staple foods such as bread, milk and sugar) are very occasionally sold as loss leaders, that is, with negative profit margins so as to attract shoppers to their store. There is some debate as to the effectiveness of this tactic. To maintain a profit, supermarkets make up for the lower margins by a higher overall volume of sales, and with the sale of higher-margin items bought by the intended higher volume of shoppers. Customers usually shop by placing their selected merchandise into shopping carts (trolleys) or baskets (self-service) and pay for the merchandise at the check-out. At present, many supermarket chains are attempting to further reduce labor costs by shifting to self-service check-out machines, where a single employee can oversee a group of four or five machines at once, assisting multiple customers at a time. A larger full-service supermarket combined with a department store is sometimes known as a hypermarket. Other services offered at some supermarkets may include those of banks, cafés, childcare centres/creches, Insurance(and other financial services), Mobile Phone services, photo processing, video rentals, pharmacies and/or petrol stations. ==History== In the early days of retailing, all products generally were fetched by an assistant from shelves behind the merchant's counter while customers waited in front of the counter and indicated the items they wanted. Also, most foods and merchandise did not come in individually wrapped consumer-sized packages, so an assistant had to measure out and wrap the precise amount desired by the consumer. This also offered opportunities for social interaction: many regarded this style of shopping as "a social occasion" and would often "pause for conversations with the staff or other customers."〔 These practices were by nature very labor-intensive and therefore also quite expensive. The shopping process was slow, as the number of customers who could be attended to at one time was limited by the number of staff employed in the store. The concept of an inexpensive food market relying on large economies of scale was developed by Vincent Astor. He founded the Astor Market in 1915, investing $750,000 ($18 million in 2015 currency) of his fortune into a 165' by 125' corner of 95th and Broadway, Manhattan, creating, in effect, an open air mini-mall that sold meat, fruit, produce and (flowers ). The expectation was that customers would come from great distances ("miles around"), but in the end even attracting people from ten blocks away was difficult, and the market folded in 1917. The concept of a self-service grocery store was developed by entrepreneur Clarence Saunders and his Piggly Wiggly stores. His first store opened in 1916. Saunders was awarded a number of patents for the ideas he incorporated into his stores.〔(CLABENCB SAOTTDEBS, CLABENCB SAOTTDEBS )〕〔(Patent US1407680 - CLARENCE SAUNDERS - Google Patents )〕〔(Patent US1704061 - OP MEMPHIS - Google Patents )〕〔(Patent US1647889 - PORATION - Google Patents )〕 The stores were a financial success and Saunders began to offer franchises. The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, which was established in 1859, was another successful early grocery store chain in Canada and the United States, and became common in North American cities in the 1920s. The general trend in since then has been to stock shelves at night so that customers, the following day, can obtain their own goods and bring them to the front of the store to pay for them. Although there is a higher risk of shoplifting, the costs of appropriate security measures ideally will be outweighed by reduced labor costs. Early self-service grocery stores did not sell fresh meats or produce. Combination stores that sold perishable items were developed in the 1920s.〔Strasser, Susan ''Never Done: A History of American Housework'' Holt Paperbacks, 2000.〕 Historically, there was debate about the origin of the supermarket, with King Kullen and Ralphs of California having strong claims.〔(Ralphs Grocery Company : Groceteria.com | Supermarket History )〕 Other contenders included Weingarten's Big Food Markets and Henke & Pillot.〔''Supermarket News'', 29 August 2005, p. 10〕 To end the debate, the Food Marketing Institute in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution and with funding from H.J. Heinz, researched the issue. It defined the attributes of a supermarket as "self-service, separate product departments, discount pricing, marketing and volume selling." It has been determined that the first true supermarket in the United States was opened by a former Kroger employee, Michael J. Cullen, on 4 August 1930, inside a former garage in Jamaica, Queens in New York City.〔Anonymous, "The place where supermarketing was born," ''Mass Market Retailers'' 19, no. 9 (17 June 2002): 172.〕 The store, King Kullen, operated under the slogan "Pile it high. Sell it low." At the time of Cullen's death in 1936, there were seventeen King Kullen stores in operation. Although Saunders had brought the world self-service, uniform stores and nationwide marketing, Cullen built on this idea by adding separate food departments, selling large volumes of food at discount prices and adding a parking lot. Other established American grocery chains in the 1930s, such as Kroger and Safeway at first resisted Cullen's idea, but eventually were forced to build their own supermarkets as the economy sank into the Great Depression, while consumers were becoming price-sensitive at a level never experienced before.〔Ryan Mathews, "1926–1936: Entrepreneurs and Enterprise: A Look at Industry Pioneers like King Kullen and J. Frank Grimes, and the Institution They Created (Special Report: Social Change & the Supermarket)," ''Progressive Grocer'' 75, no. 12 (December 1996): 39–43.〕 Kroger took the idea one step further and pioneered the first supermarket surrounded on all four sides by a parking lot. As larger chain supermarkets began to dominate the market in the USA, able to supply consumers with the desired lower prices as opposed to the smaller "mom and pop" stands with considerable more overhead costs, the backlash of this infrastructure alteration was seen through numerous anti-chain campaigns. The idea of "monopsony," proposed by Cambridge economist Joan Robinson in 1933, that a single buyer could out-power the market of multiple sellers, became a strong anti-chain rhetorical device. With public backlash came political pressure to even the playing field for smaller vendors without the luxuries of economies of scale. In 1936, the Robinson-Patman Act was implemented as a way of preventing such larger chains from using this buying power to reap advantages over smaller, although the act was not well enforced and did not have much impact in the prevention of larger chains overtaking power in the markets.〔Hamilton, Shane ''Supermarkets, Free markets, and the Problem of Buying Power in Postwar United States,'' in What's Good For Business: Business and Politics Since World War II, ed. Julian Zelizer and Kim Phillips-Fein (Oxford University Press, 2012).〕 Supermarkets proliferated across Canada and the United States with the growth of automobile ownership and suburban development after World War II. Most North American supermarkets are located in suburban strip shopping centers as an anchor store along. They are generally regional rather than national in their company branding. Kroger is perhaps the most nationally oriented supermarket chain in the United States but it has preserved most of its regional brands, including Ralphs, City Market, King Soopers, Fry's, Smith's, and QFC. In Canada, the largest such company is Loblaw, which operates stores under a variety of banners targeted to different segments and regions, including Fortinos, Zehrs, No Frills, the Real Canadian Superstore, and Loblaws, the foundation of the company. Sobeys is Canada's second largest supermarket with locations across the country, operating under many banners (Sobeys IGA in Quebec). Québec's first supermarket opened in 1934 in Montréal, under the banner Steinberg's.〔(The Canadian Encyclopedia )〕 In the United Kingdom, self-service shopping took longer to become established. Even in 1947, there were just ten self-service shops in the country. In 1951, ex-US Navy sailor Patrick Galvani, son-in-law of Express Dairies chairman, made a pitch to the board to open a chain of supermarkets across the country. The UK's first supermarket under the new Premier Supermarkets brand opened in Streatham, South London, taking ten times as much per week as the average British general store of the time. Other chains caught on, and after Galvani lost out to Tesco's Jack Cohen in 1960 to buy the 212 Irwin's chain, the sector underwent a large amount of consolidation, resulting in 'the big four' dominant UK of today: Tesco, Asda (owned by Wal-Mart), Sainsbury's and Morrisons. In the 1950s, supermarkets frequently issued trading stamps as incentives to customers. Today, most chains issue store-specific "membership cards," "club cards," or "loyalty cards". These typically enable the card holder to receive special members-only discounts on certain items when the credit card-like device is scanned at check-out. Sales of selected data generated by clubcards is becoming a significant revenue stream for some supermarkets. Traditional supermarkets in many countries face intense competition from discounters such as Wal-Mart, and Tesco in the UK, which typically are non-union and operate with better buying power. Other competition exists from warehouse clubs such as Costco that offer savings to customers buying in bulk quantities. Superstores, such as those operated by Wal-Mart and Asda, often offer a wide range of goods and services in addition to foods. The proliferation of such warehouse and superstores has contributed to the continuing disappearance of smaller, local grocery stores; increased dependence on the automobile; suburban sprawl because of the necessity for large floorspace and increased vehicular traffic. For example, in 2009 51% of Wal-Mart's $251 Billion domestic sales were recorded from grocery goods. 〔Csipak, James J., Rohit Rampal, and Laurent Josien. "The Effect Of A Wal-Mart Supercenter On Supermarket Food Prices: The Case Of The City Of Plattsburgh In Upstate New York." Academy Of Marketing Studies Journal 2 (2014): 251. Academic OneFile. Web. 5 Nov. 2015.〕 Some critics consider the chains' common practice of selling loss leaders to be anti-competitive. They are also wary of the negotiating power that large, often multinational have with suppliers around the world. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「supermarket」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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