In 1900, brothers Albert and Hugh Gerrard, later joined by a third brother, Will, put their entire savings of $300 into a meat market in Pomona, California. This was the start of what eventually became a chain of around 300 grocery stores dubbed Alpha Beta, which spanned across the Southwest and pioneered self-service shopping. This was thanks to the company’s unique, alphabetized shopping system. If a customer was looking for zucchini, for instance, they could find it near the zippers. The Gerrard brothers developed this system to help guide shoppers, who were unfamiliar with finding their own groceries. Under a typical grocery store model, customers would hand their list of desired items to a clerk, who would retrieve their selections for them.
Over the following decades, Alpha Beta expanded, merged with other companies, changed hands, and (in some cases) changed names. By 1995, there were no Alpha Beta locations left, and like A&P, another lost grocery chain that shuttered in 2016, the chain closed its doors. Not only did Alpha Beta disappear, but so did the company’s claim to being one of the first (if not the very first) grocery stores to change how customers shopped for food.
Alpha Beta was ahead of its time
Long beforeSouthern California became the unofficial birthplace of fast food, it was an incubator for innovative grocery stores. Tennessee-based Piggly Wiggly, founded in 1916, is often credited with being the first modern grocery store to introduce self-service, but in California, the Gerrard brothers’ Triangle Cash Markets chain (Alpha Beta’s predecessor) officially introduced self-service shopping back in 1914. There’s also evidence that the brothers were already testing out the “basket store” concept (in which customers shop for themselves using baskets) a year before that, predating Piggly Wiggly by three years. Additionally, Ward’s Groceteria in Ocean Park, California also introduced the self-service concept around 1914.
The idea was a hit, and sometime around 1917, the Gerrard brothers changed the company’s name to Alpha Beta to better reflect their alphabetical shopping system. As time went on, the company instituted other novel ideas, like using air transport to ship fresh fruit to its stores and putting shopping cart corrals in its parking lots. Then, in 1994, the company that owned Alpha Beta bought the Ralph’s grocery store chain and rebranded the brothers’ stores under that name. By September 1995, the Alpha Beta brand was gone forever…