The last time I checked, I think I discovered that I had written some 47,586 times about Clarence Saunders, and Piggly Wiggly, and his automated Keedoozle stores, and even his oddly named "Sole Owner of My Name" groceries. Just look at all the links below!
So I kinda thought I was done with Mr. Saunders for a while.
But then I came across this really wonderful full-color advertisement, promoting the products of the Great Lakes Steel Corporation, and what do you know — they show the very first Keedoozle Store, which Sanders opened at Poplar and Union Extended.
"It's more than fitting that the world's first fully automatic grocery store ... should be housed in a Stran-Steel Quonset," they say. "For there's a harmony of purpose, of appearance, between this building and the enterprise within it."
The curved roofline does have a nice look to it, I have to admit, something the ad calls "modern functional beauty."
A detail (hard to see, so I've blown it up a bit) shows that the interior, however, didn't follow the lines of the exterior. Instead, the Keedoozle store had a somewhat vaulted ceiling, and if you weren't fond of red-and-white stripes or checkerboards, then I guess you'd have to do your shopping elsewhere. Whew, this would give me a migraine!
I've studied lots of photos of the Keedoozle store, in my lonely evenings at the Mansion, but this is the first image I've seen that shows how colorful they were, inside and out.
The Keedoozle venture, as I've said before, was ahead of its time. More specifically, it was ahead of the technology of the day. The automated system kept breaking down, and shoppers lost confidence that they were actually getting the groceries they had paid for. The building shown here was eventually demolished, and replaced with a structure also known for its modern architecture — a completely round, mirror-glassed bank building.
