- My camera's not turning on.
It's not turning on.
(crowd murmuring)
Okay.
- Does this seem like a desert to you?
(man laughing)
It's ridiculous.
(man laughing)
(woman gasping)
- Can you be a total asshole
and still change the world for the better?
I'm not actually sure about that question,
but there's one guy who certainly
seems like proof that you can,
and you've probably never heard his name.
- The most fascinating character in American history
I've never heard anything about.
- And yes, that's John Green,
an OG YouTuber and author of The Fault In Our Stars
and Turtles All The Way Down,
and someone who I am a giant fan of,
and during this interview was sort of low-key freaking out.
Anyway, John Green wrote a book
with some very juicy and fascinating essays,
link in the doobly-doo.
And one of those essays is about this guy.
- Clarence Saunders.
(shutter clicking)
- Yes, Clarence Saunders.
Clarence Saunders changed everything,
at least here in the United States.
And to understand how,
you have to understand grocery stores.
(energetic old-time music)
Specifically, what grocery stores
used to look like a hundred years ago.
Wait a minute.
Before we go on,
let me just tell you something really quickly.
See this?
Inside of this little case are earbuds
that I've been using lately.
And the earbuds are made by Raycon,
who are the sponsor of today's video.
These are called the Everyday Earbuds,
and as the sun has been coming out,
and as I've been sort of trying to get back to normal,
I've been exercising for the first time in awhile,
and going for runs.
And when I go for runs, I listen to audiobooks.
Is that a nerdy thing that I do?
I listen to audiobooks when I go for runs.
Anyway, these earbuds have been awesome.
Unlike most of earbuds, they don't fall out of my ears.
I tend to have these like, big ear holes.
And what I love about these Everyday Earbuds is that
they come with different sized like, gel fittings.
So I can just put the biggest ones on,
and they actually like stick in my ear
and they don't fall out.
That's cool.
The other thing is the battery life is basically forever.
Like, it's like 32 hours of battery life,
which is a very long time.
And they're like, really affordable.
They're like, half the price of premium earbuds
that are out there.
So they're affordable, they sound really good,
and they stay in my ears,
and the battery lasts for a long time.
So I've been going on runs,
I've been listening to audiobooks with these earbuds,
and I really like them.
Raycon comes with a 45-day happiness guarantee.
Like, they're so confident
that you're going to like these earbuds
that they're just like, yeah, try them for 45 days,
and we like, guarantee that you'll be happy.
So if you're interested in even looking into these,
there's a link in my description,
buyraycon.com/johnnyharris.
Please use that link if you're going to go check these out.
First off, you get 15% off of these earbuds if you do that.
And then also, it helps support this channel
when you go to that link,
so that Raycon knows that you showed up to them
through this video.
There's also a card like, up here somewhere
that is that link, too.
That is technology.
We can put little cards in YouTube videos.
Welcome to the future.
Thank you, Raycon, for sending me these awesome earbuds
and for supporting this channel
and for sponsoring today's video.
And let's get back to the story now.
Clarence Saunders, what a man.
- So my great grandfather's grocery store in rural Tennessee
was like almost every grocery store in America.
It was called a full service grocery store.
You walked in, there was a counter,
you often handed the grocer list,
and then the grocer would go and get all of your food.
And then they would weigh it all, and they would charge you,
and often, you would pay back that grocery bill
over time on credit.
There were no aisles.
Customers usually didn't pick brand names,
so brand named food wasn't nearly as important as it is now.
And also, highly processed packaged food
wasn't nearly as important as it is now.
- The first thing this guy, Clarence Saunders,
did was he had an idea.
- He would later like, tell the origin story
of many different ways, but one of the ways he told it,
he would say, "I was on a train,
and like a bolt of lightning,
the idea hit me for the future of American food."
- [Announcer] A daily battle is being waged in supermarkets
all over this country.
A battle for the customer's dollar.
- His concept for a grocery store was a store with aisles
where customers themselves would walk through the aisles
and pick their own food.
There would be price tags on the food,
which had never been the case before.
And he would call this grocery store Piggly Wiggly.
- Wait, what?
Piggly Wiggly?
Piggly Wiggly, why?
Wait, why?
- That's a great question, Johnny.
So one time, Saunders was asked about this
and he answered that the name of the grocery store, quote,
"arrived from out of chaos and in direct contact
with an individual's mind."
Which maybe gives you a little bit of a concept
of the sort of dude her was.
- Some men just want to watch the world burn.
(Johnny laughing)
- Oh, that is amazing.
- But mostly, when people would ask,
"why call your grocery store Piggly Wiggly,"
he would answer, "so that people will ask
that very question."
- Man, this feels like the Old Spice commercials.
- [Woman] Pair Charmin Freshmates with your Char-
- (yells) Old Spice body spray is too powerful
to stay in its own commercial!
- Yes. - We're going to just be like,
so weird and crazy that like, everyone will be curious.
- And a huge percentage of his advertising budget
went to ads that were so weird.
I mean, he called the third Piggly Wiggly Piggly Wiggly III
because he felt that it was owed a certain royal dignity.
I mean, it was very much like the early 1920s and 30s
version of the Old Spice ads.
(Terry Crews yelling)
- Okay, so Clarence Saunders basically just disrupted
the old way of grocery shopping.
And as a consequence, a bunch of clerks,
these people who used to do the grocery shopping,
lost their job.
- My great grandfather's grocery store closed
as did many, many others.
A lot of jobs were lost in this.
And there was widespread fear about, you know,
losing jobs to automation, losing jobs to hyper-efficiency,
which also, of course, foreshadows some current concerns.
- Technology today could lead to 45%
of current jobs disappearing.
- But that doesn't make him an asshole.
Like, there are people all the time making businesses
that people lose jobs on and we sort of freak out about it,
but it's actually better for the world.
Oh, and he was pioneering new ways of like,
guerrilla marketing that made people talk about him more,
which is a really cool thing, too.
It seems like this guy changed the world for the better.
And he did.
But he also starts to give us signs of who he really is.
- So even early on, there were some indications
that Saunders was a bully,
that he could be very cruel to employees,
that he could shortchange partners.
And he was obsessed with growth,
he was obsessed with making Piggly Wiggly
as big as possible as fast as possible,
taking over the entire world.
In fact, even when Piggly Wiggly was a
Memphis-only phenomenon in the very early days,
he would put on the windows outside the store,
"Piggly Wiggly: All Over The World."
- So this gets to my question.
As someone who is building a startup right now
and thinking a lot about building a company,
I genuinely have this question.
Do you really need to be the mean bully founder and boss
to make a world-changing business?
We'll try to answer that question in a little bit,
but first, I got to tell you the next part
of the Clarence Saunders story.
Because it's just too good not to tell.
(soft percussion music)
- This is where we start to see
a lot of the negatives of Clarence Saunders.
He became obsessed with trying to
prove these Wall Street speculators wrong.
And as he lost control of the business,
he became more and more angry and vitriolic
and really hateful.
He wrote about this, at times, quite beautifully.
Like, once he wrote, "they have it all, everything I built,
the greatest stores of their kind in the world,
but they didn't get the man that was father to the idea.
They have the body of Piggly Wiggly,
but they didn't get the soul."
And I just love that.
I mean, how much do you have to believe in yourself
to be like, "I am the soul of this company."
So his next idea isn't quite the same
as the original Piggly Wiggly.
It's actually much closer to contemporary grocery stores
because there are still aisles
where people pick out a lot of their own food,
but there are also staffed counters
for the deli department and for the bakery.
As he's developing this new idea,
he wants to call the grocery store Saunders.
Because of course he does.
But the people who own Piggly Wiggly are like,
"no, no, no, no, no."
You are not allowed to use your name
in selling a grocery store
because that would be a direct competitor to Piggly Wiggly,
and that is a violation of our agreements.
And in response, Clarence Saunders decides
to call his new grocery store
the Clarence Saunders Sole Owner Of My Name grocery store.
- Oh my gosh, it's so good.
It's like, I didn't realize you could one-up
this sort of self-centeredness and like,
snarkiness of this guy. - Yes, yes.
- And then it's like, again,
he's doing this to his business.
Like, this is what is going to be out there to the world,
and yet he's using it as his like, personal ego-fest.
I love it.
- But that's a lot of what we see
with 21st century capitalism too,
is these highly charismatic individual founders
who are really lifted up as the centerpiece of the company,
that it's not about the 75,000 or 200,000 employees
working together on a project.
It's about this one god man, you know?
Almost always a man.
- My question is now for you as a person
who's grown businesses and has led people,
and I'm in this now more and more
as I grow like, a startup and stuff.
And like, Clarence Saunders was obviously very successful.
Like, timing might've been a little bit off,
but like, he was very successful in disrupting
and changing things and building a business
that still exists today.
Do you have to be an asshole to like,
build big businesses in the capitalistic system?
Like, is that a prerequisite to like,
be hyper successful, in your mind?
- I'm not sure.
I was on a phone call once with a very successful
entrepreneur person.
And he said to me, "you're too loyal to your people
and not loyal enough to your product."
And my feeling about that was well,
if that's the side that we're going to err on,
that's the side I would prefer to err on.
Like, I believe in humans making stuff together.
I don't really believe in the idea of these sui generis,
brilliant individuals who reshape history on their own.
I mean, the truth is, like almost every successful person,
Clarence Saunders was a bubble on the tide of empire,
as Robert Penn Warren put it.
He was riding a wave that was much, much larger than him.
And, I mean, he was a very bright guy,
but I think that in the end,
that obsession with growth at all costs,
that obsession with, you know, winning, it ruined him.
I mean, he died a poor man in a
sanitarium for mentally ill people.
He alienated almost everyone who loved him in his life.
And I don't think that's the hero's journey.
(calm music)