King Kullen – A Wall Street Journal debate over what counted as a supermarket in 1944, and Michael Cullen’s push for “monstrous” low-markup stores in the late 1920s, show how the self-service grocery model was built—and why customers lined up the moment the first price prom
In 1930, the line started forming almost immediately—because the price was the hook.
Michael Cullen opened his own store in Queens. New York. after he wrote an idea for “monstrous” stores while managing a Kroger in Illinois in 1929. His pitch to Kroger’s president. William Albers. was blunt: build stores where goods would move quickly because items would be priced with little markup. “Thanks to the volume of items. ” Cullen wrote. “they would still make a profit.” He even predicted he’d sell $10. 000 worth of groceries a week.
Cullen kept chasing the same promise when he launched King Kullen in 1930. Ads called it the “world’s greatest price wrecker.” The warehouse measured 6. 000 square feet and held 1. 000 items—an arrangement designed for speed and for the kind of shopping where customers could grab what they needed without waiting around for clerks.
By 1944, the argument had shifted from whether stores could be built this way to what, exactly, made them a supermarket. The Wall Street Journal reported that even industry experts couldn’t settle on a definition. Most agreed the stores had several departments—including produce, meat, and dairy—and that the grocery areas were self-service. The Super Market Institute set a minimum sales volume at $200,000 a year, about $3.6 million today.
For some historians, the pieces fit together in Cullen’s King Kullen.
The story doesn’t end with one opening day. Cullen died in 1936 after complications from an appendectomy. His wife took over the company, which had already opened more than a dozen stores. Together, those stores made more than $6 million a year—more than $139 million today. Even after his death, the scale of what he started stayed on the board.
And while Cullen’s supermarket model was taking hold, Albers kept moving. Three years after King Kullen announced itself as a price wrecker, Albers left Kroger to open his own eponymous stores—the first to use the term “super market” in its name.
The sequence reads like a confrontation conducted with shopping baskets: Cullen’s low-markup. high-volume idea drew crowds in 1930; the industry later wrestled with how to define the format; and then Albers. watching from the other side of the grocery business. left to claim the “super market” label for his own stores.
King Kullen Michael Cullen William Albers Kroger supermarket definition self-service grocery produce meat dairy Wall Street Journal Super Market Institute