If you walked along Newport Avenue in Ocean Beach nearly a century ago, grocery shopping meant choosing among several neighborhood markets.
One of them had a name that was hard to forget.
A photograph from the San Diego History Center shows the Piggly Wiggly Market at 5004 Newport Ave. The storefront carries the name in large letters across the facade, while a sign below identifies it as a meat market. Produce fills the windows, and a Newport Avenue street sign stands near the curb.
The address is confirmed in San Diego’s historical records.
The 1941 San Diego city directory lists Piggly Wiggly of San Diego Inc. with a branch at 5004 Newport Ave. A 1941 advertisement also lists the Ocean Beach store, along with Piggly Wiggly locations in National City, La Jolla, Chula Vista, La Mesa, Coronado, Mission Beach and Escondido. The advertisement described the company as “100% owned and operated by San Diegans.”
A new way to shop
The Piggly Wiggly name was already associated with a major change in the way Americans bought groceries.
Clarence Saunders opened the first Piggly Wiggly in Memphis in 1916. Instead of handing a shopping list to a clerk who gathered the merchandise, customers entered the store themselves, selected their own products from open shelves, and paid at a checkout.
The self-service concept eventually became standard in American grocery stores.
San Diego was an early part of that story. City directories from the 1920s identify Dudley D. Williams as manager of Piggly Wiggly of San Diego. A 1926 city directory lists Williams as manager of the local operation.
The company grew into a substantial regional operation. A 1934 San Diego directory, for example, lists Piggly Wiggly stores in Chula Vista, Coronado, Escondido, La Jolla, La Mesa and National City.
By the time the Ocean Beach store appeared in the 1940s records, Piggly Wiggly was well established throughout the region.
Newport Avenue was grocery country
Piggly Wiggly was not alone on Newport Avenue.
Contemporary Ocean Beach newspapers show other grocery businesses operating nearby. Faber’s, for example, advertised an Ocean Beach Grocery at 5008 Newport Ave., just a few doors from the Piggly Wiggly location. Faber’s also had a store at 5021 Newport Ave.
Other markets competed for neighborhood shoppers as well. Historical grocery research places Safeway and other chains at Newport Avenue addresses during the same era.
The local newspaper advertisements offer a useful glimpse of Newport Avenue as a busy commercial district, where residents could shop for groceries, meat, and other necessities without leaving the neighborhood.
What happened to the Piggly Wiggly?
The answer is visible in the city directories.
In 1941, Piggly Wiggly was operating at 5004 Newport Ave. By 1952, the same address was listed as Faber’s Super-Ette Market.
That change illustrates an important point about Piggly Wiggly. It was a grocery brand and franchising organization, not a chain in which every store necessarily remained under identical ownership. Individual stores could change names or ownership while the Piggly Wiggly name continued elsewhere.
Historical grocery research shows Piggly Wiggly stores operating at several San Diego addresses into the 1950s. The San Diego locations were not acquired by Safeway, as happened with Piggly Wiggly stores in Los Angeles.
So the Ocean Beach store did not mark the end of Piggly Wiggly in San Diego. It was one location that eventually changed names.
So what’s behind the name?
That may be the most memorable part of the story. Even the origin of “Piggly Wiggly” has never been firmly established.
Saunders was famously reluctant to explain the unusual name. One story claims he saw little pigs struggling to get under a fence while riding a train. Another theory connects the name to the nursery rhyme “This Little Piggy Went to Market.”
Saunders reportedly gave a much simpler explanation when asked why he had chosen such an odd name: “So people will ask that very question.”
Whether that was the real reason or simply another story, the name certainly accomplished one thing: People remembered it.
A newspaper boy and a streetcar
The Piggly Wiggly also survives in a later recollection of Ocean Beach life.
In a 1990 Los Angeles Times story, longtime Ocean Beach resident Wayne Andrews recalled selling copies of the San Diego Sun when he was 15 years old in 1937.
His newspapers arrived by streetcar. He sold them in front of the Piggly Wiggly market at the corner of Newport Avenue and Bacon Street.
Andrews remembered selling the newspapers for 3 cents and making a half-cent profit on each one. He later spent his career in the Navy, but decades afterward he still remembered the corner where he had sold papers as a teenager.
That recollection adds something the directories cannot: a sense of how the store fit into everyday Ocean Beach life.
The Piggly Wiggly was not simply an entry in a business directory. It was a place where a teenager sold newspapers, where neighborhood residents bought groceries, and where the streetcar helped move people and goods through the community.
A grocery idea that stuck
The Ocean Beach store eventually disappeared, but the shopping method associated with Piggly Wiggly did not.
The company’s self-service system helped change the relationship between shoppers and grocery stores. Customers no longer waited for clerks to retrieve every item. They walked the aisles, chose what they wanted, and brought their purchases to a checkout.
That basic system became so commonplace that few shoppers today would think of it as an innovation.
The Piggly Wiggly name itself survived, too. The company continues to operate through independently owned stores around the country.
But at 5004 Newport Ave., the name eventually gave way to Faber’s Super-Ette Market.
The photograph preserves the earlier chapter: the large Piggly Wiggly lettering, the produce displayed in the windows, and the Newport Avenue storefront where Ocean Beach residents once did their shopping.
The records establish when and where the store operated. The photograph shows what it looked like, and Wayne Andrews’ recollection places it in the daily life of the neighborhood.
For a store with such an unusual name, its legacy is surprisingly ordinary. Walk into a supermarket today, choose your own groceries and take them to a checkout counter; you are still using the basic idea Saunders introduced more than a century ago.
On Newport Avenue, Piggly Wiggly was simply the neighborhood grocery store.
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Sources:
San Diego History Center, photograph of Piggly Wiggly Market, Newport Avenue and Bacon Street, 1928.
San Diego City Directories, 1926, 1934, 1941 and 1952.
The Los Angeles Times, Jan. 13, 1990, profile of Ocean Beach resident Wayne Andrews.
City of San Diego historical research on Piggly Wiggly and Dudley D. Williams.
Groceteria, historical San Diego grocery-store research.
