Dear Vance: An old building on Jackson has a painted sign with the words “Mr. Bower” below what seems to be an image of a dog. Who was Bower, and what kind of business was this? — G.H., Memphis.
Dear G.H.: Whenever anyone talks about the grocery business in Memphis (there, I gave away part of the answer, didn’t I?), the name that always comes up is Clarence Saunders. And with good reason: With his Piggly Wiggly chain of stores, Saunders pretty much invented the modern self-service supermarket, built the impressive Pink Palace mansion, and then developed the automated Keedoozle grocery stores.
But there were obviously other grocers in town at the same time, and one of the most successful and best-known (not just for selling groceries, but for his civic concerns) was Duke C. Bowers. With an “s” on the end of his name, G.H. That “ghost sign” you’ve noticed is missing several elements, but I’m glad the little bulldog survived, complete with his muzzle, because it was Bowers’ symbol and slogan. “You Won’t Get Bit,” his ads proclaimed, “If You Buy of Mr. Bowers.”
I always assumed Duke was a nickname, but it was apparently his first name, and Bowers was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1874. Other sources say his birthplace was Columbus, Kentucky. I know this because my pal Gene Gill, who maintains a very fine website called Historic Memphis, has a complete section devoted to Bowers, with vintage photographs and a few articles where Bowers spelled out his business principles. Much of what I’m about to tell you here is taken from that, along with a column written by noted Memphis historian Paul Coppock. But I have a few Bowers items of my own, tucked away in the world-famous Lauderdale Library and Sno-Cone Parlor, and I’ll get to them, if you’re patient.
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“You Won’t Get Bit, If You Buy of Mr. Bowers.” A pair of bulldogs that served as the company’s “mascot” still guard the entrance to a former Bowers store on Florida Street.
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“You Won’t Get Bit, If You Buy of Mr. Bowers.” A pair of bulldogs that served as the company’s “mascot” still guard the entrance to a former Bowers store on Florida Street.
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In his short lifetime, Duke Bowers made a fortune with his little “Temples of Economy” grocery stores, eventually opening more than 60 in Memphis in just a few years. Photograph of Duke Bowers courtesy University of Memphis Special Collections.
When Bowers’ parents died at a young age — wait, I mean he was at a young age, not his ma and pa — he was taken in by his aunt and uncle, who ran a grocery store in Hickman, Kentucky. Surely you’ve been there. It was a hard way to make a living, and Bowers decided it was (as we might say today) a flawed business model. Too much merchandise, he figured, was sold on credit. You’ve seen all the old movies, where somebody told the store clerk to “put it on my bill” or promised to pay “as soon as my crops come in.” It’s a crucial scene in classic films, such as Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again. Anyway, when he was old enough, Bowers and his wife, Ethel, moved to Memphis in 1903 to open a store of their own here, and he decided it would be a cash-only enterprise. What’s more, he declared he would never sell alcohol or tobacco, and he would make no deliveries. It was strictly cash-and-carry.
“I buy for cash and I sell for cash. And each night the empty spaces on my shelves represent dollars and cents in the cash drawer.”
— Duke C. Bowers
There was nothing fancy about these groceries. They were the old-fashioned kind, with the clerk at the counter, who fetched your order from shelves behind him. Saunders may have been dreaming of a way for shoppers to do all the work, and he gave his new enterprise a catchy name (what does “Piggly Wiggly” even mean?). But by sticking to his basic principles, Bowers’ first store, located at the corner of Polk and McKinley, was a success and he began to open others all over town, at first calling all of them exactly what they were: Mr. Bowers Little Stores.
It’s not clear — not to me, anyway — how he came up with the idea of the cute little muzzled bulldog, but that puppy showed up in all of his advertising, and he even had two of them (carved in stone, I mean) mounted above the entrance of the big store and warehouse that he opened in 1905 on Florida Street.
“I buy for cash and I sell for cash,” he said in a 1911 article. “And each night the empty spaces on my shelves represent dollars and cents in the cash drawer.” He measured his costs down to the penny, and even the half-penny, because his profit margin was set at precisely 12.5 percent. Anything over that, he said, was “extortion and injustice.”
In his short lifetime, Duke Bowers made a fortune with his little “Temples of Economy” grocery stores, eventually opening more than 60 in Memphis in just a few years.
Mr. Bowers Stores were run so efficiently, he thought, that he began to promote them as “Temples of Economy” and he spread that message in a variety of ways. Newspaper advertisements were, of course, effective at announcing his many store locations, but Coppock noted that though he also listed his products, he rarely bothered to tell customers his prices: “Sometimes he said he was ‘passing prosperity around.’” Well, it certainly came back to him. Just four years after moving to Memphis, he owned 21 stores; four years later, that number had grown to 39. He would eventually operate more than 60 stores in our city.
By the way, that old sign you noticed on Jackson, G.H., marked the location of Mr. Bowers Store #12.
Bowers placed ads everywhere he could, such as the 1911 yearbook of the Higbee School, where he urged those students, “Attention Young Ladies: Won’t you get your mother to buy groceries from me? I believe she can save enough to pay your tuition. Duke C. Bowers.”
In the Lauderdale Library is another, more unusual promotion. I’m not sure how this was distributed, but a brochure called “Bowers Hymns” included popular songs with the lyrics revised to promote Mr. Bowers Stores. For example, sung to the tune of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” was a song called “Bowers’ Men” with these lyrics: “Who makes the housewife’s burden light? The Bowers Stores! / Whose service does she know is right? The Bowers Stores!” It went on like this for some time, then concluded with the remarkable line, “For we’re Bow-wow-wow-wow, all of us Bowers’ men.” There were other hymns, but you get the picture.
I earlier mentioned his civic concerns. Duke and Ethel donated money to many local charities and provided the funds to build nice wading pools in Overton and Health Sciences parks, which Coppock claims were the city’s first public pools. He would take a busload of orphans on trips to Hot Springs, or to the circus, much as the Lauderdales have done for years. But his main cause was the complete elimination of capital punishment, running full-page newspaper ads proclaiming “Capital Punishment Is Murder.”
In 1915, he had enough clout to persuade state senators to pass what became known as the “Bowers Bill,” which, as explained on the Historic Memphis website, “substituted life imprisonment for the death penalty in case of murder. The General Assembly passed the bill by a vote of 51 to 44 in the House and 20 to 11 in the Senate.” Even so, the law was overturned less than four years later.
I can’t even guess what else Bowers might have accomplished in Memphis, if his health hadn’t failed him when he was in his forties. He was forced to sell his grocery chain to a business partner, Joseph M. Fly, who ultimately sold the stores to the Kroger company in 1928. I bet you didn’t know Kroger had been around that long, did you?
Bowers and his wife moved to the town of Dresden, Tennessee, some 90 miles east, to escape the hectic pace of life in the “big city.” Even then, he didn’t slow down. Ever the businessman, he bought real estate, “at various times owning large portions of the town,” according to Gill.
Bowers died from a stroke in 1917, after returning from Washington, D.C. His obituary in the Dresden newspaper reported, “He had held a conference with Herbert Hoover [then in charge of supplies for the U.S. Army during World War One] about food conservation and would probably have been asked to serve the government in some capacity if he had lived. This action was only one of thousands showing his unswerving loyalty and desire to serve his fellow man and his country.”
He was just 43 years old. Bowers was so popular in Dresden that all businesses closed for his funeral. His wife lived another four decades after his death. When Ethel passed away in 1958, she was buried in the Bowers family plot in Dresden’s Sunset Cemetery, and a granite obelisk there marks Duke Bowers’ last resting place. I’ve studied photos of the monument, and it looks nice, but I wish they had carved a little bulldog on it somewhere.
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Mail: Vance Lauderdale, Memphis magazine, 65 Union Avenue, Suite 200, Memphis, TN 38103
