The “supercenter,” occasionally identified by its European designation, the “hypermarket,” is a retail format most American shoppers associate with Walmart. First appearing in the late 1980s—the sunny and deeply capitalist Reagan era—and exploding in the 1990s and 2000s, the Walmart Supercenter dominates the big-box discount market. Walmart, in fact, is not only among the top brick-and-mortar retailers, but also does the highest volume of grocery retailing.
The first Walmart Supercenter opened in 1988, but it was inspired by a 1987 test concept that Walmart called, after the European name, Hypermarket. The Hypermarket, with some tweaks, became the Supercenter. And that, you might think, is how the supercenter concept was introduced in the United States. Walmart itself suggests so. “The Hypermart was one of the earliest ‘combination stores’—designed to house grocery and general merchandise alongside one another,” the company boasts. Noting the Hypermarket’s carnival-like atmosphere and mix of diverse departments and services (pared down for the later Supercenter concept), they write, “If this wild variety sounds strange now, imagine how it must have seemed in 1980s middle America!”
But this is not quite the case. The retail format we now call the supercenter existed in various incarnations as far back as the early 1960s or late 1950s. But for whatever reason—despite the explosion of consumerism in the postwar era—the idea of a supermarket and discount department store under one roof simply didn’t stick. Various attempts, some by grocery chains and others by department store chains, fizzled. The history of the concept provides a view of a fascinating and obscure bit of American retail evolution.
The original supercenters came in many shades and flavors. It’s a bit like the plethora of automobile manufacturers in the early days of the car era, or the huge variety of personal computer manufacturers or assemblers in the 1990s. If you were to map it, it would look like the charts of branching species in particularly active periods of evolution, when many related creatures coexisted and separated into different lineages, with few survivors today.
Some proto-supercenters were cobbled together out of adjacent discount stores and grocery stores. The best example of this was the co-location of Bradlees discount stores with Stop & Shop supermarkets, following the grocery chain’s acquisition of the discount chain in 1961. The stores were typically just next to each other in strip plazas, although some locations joined the two halves with an interior doorway. Dividing walls between the discount and grocery departments, usually also with separate checkout areas, were common in this period. Unbroken, common-area sales floors were unusual.