Improving on Trajan

In the 2nd century A.D., the Emperor Trajan startled Rome's housewives by introducing the revolutionary idea of the covered market. It seemed the last word in shopping, and for the next 18 centuries it was the last word--in Italy. Every weekday morning for those 1,800-odd years, the Italian housewife (or her maid) set out on the same ritualistic, time-consuming round.

For chicken and eggs she went to one shop, for olive oil or wine to another. She could not buy pork where she bought veal. If she wanted sausages, she could not expect to find eggs at a nearby counter. After both industries became state monopolies, she had to go to the neighborhood tobacconist to buy salt. Each day she had to visit up to a dozen different shops to buy just enough food to last until the next day. Each day shopping for food alone took anything up to four hours.

Most shoppers and most shopkeepers still hew to this ancient system, but a rapidly increasing number of Italian housewives have allowed themselves to be liberated. The liberator: the American-style supermarket.

Rockefeller Revolution. Italians said the supermarket could never succeed, and for long years the arguments sounded convincing: the housewife would never surrender the personal pleasure of bargaining down prices with the neighborhood shopkeeper, maids would not forego their leisurely gossip sessions in the marketplace, clerks and customers would steal the counters bare (as they did in a small-scale experiment with a self-service store in Milan in 1949). But after Romans stampeded the big U.S. supermarket set up under the direction of Grand Union's President Lansing P. Shield at an international food congress in Rome in 1956, enterprising Italians and American businessmen decided the time had come to improve on Trajan.

Today Milan and Rome between them boast eight supermarkets. Biggest operators: the Italian-owned Supermercato S.p.A., and the fast-growing Supermarkets Italiani (majority owner: Nelson Rockefeller's International Basic Economy Co.). Up to 10,000 customers a day in the two cities revel in the choice of up to 1,800 separate items ranging from insecticide to canned swallow's nests, from canned Malayan pineapples to frozen pizzas and spaghetti in plastic bags. Increasingly, middle-class housewives leave their maids at home (thus ending the maids' expected rake-off on the week's shopping money), personally wheel their market carts in air-conditioned luxury past shelves labeled in English "roast chicken" (which presumably sounds more exotic than polio arrosto). Tommy-gun-toting guards accompany the cashiers to the company's central office with the day's take; the supermarkets' loss from theft is less than 1%.

Better than Brynner. For the ordinary Italian family the supermarket still has drawbacks. Unlike the small shops, the supermarkets do not give credit or make home deliveries. Most Italian housewives cannot afford imported foods, cannot take home much food on a motor scooter, and do not have a refrigerator to store the food at home. Nonetheless, shopkeepers located near supermarkets complain that their business is down a third. Even Communist housewives have ignored the Red complaint that "Rockefeller is strangling the food merchants."

Last week, as he contemplated licensing still another supermercato over the protests of the Reds and the merchants, Milan's Mayor Virgilio Ferrari said: "It doesn't matter to me that those whom people call supercapitalists are running this business. What matters is that people pay less." (Supermarket prices average about 10% below those in the shops.) From a Milan housewife came even more heartfelt praise. Said she: "I enjoy a trip to the supermarket more than seeing Yul Brynner in the movies."

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