Retro regional grocery chain draws new fans with collectible mascot merch

Merchandise from a regional grocery store chain with locations across the Midwest and South has become a hot commodity.Nicola Miller, of Suffolk, England, will detour as much as 50 miles to visit a Piggly Wiggly when she’s in America, hoping to add another T-shirt featuring the iconic, cheerful Mr.Pig to her collection, Food & Drink reported.Miller first encountered the mascot in the 1978 film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” which features the retro pig face in the film’s final scene.She told Food & Drink that Piggly Wiggly stores and the company’s logo “spark joy” and nostalgia for her.Miller is not alone.The Piggly Wiggly brand “resonates across all ages and demographics,” Terry F.

Goins, Piggly Wiggly director of marketing and advertising for the Midwest, told Fox News Digital.“Younger shoppers are drawn to exactly the qualities that make it retro: the hand-drawn feel, the humor, the fact that it’s unmistakably regional and not from a national chain,” Goins said.“For a lot of younger customers, it’s less, ‘I remember this’ and more, ‘This is where I’m from.'”The branding is warm and “doesn’t take itself too seriously,” Goins added. “Mr.Pig has never been redesigned into something sleek and corporate.

He looks like he looked.In a category where most logos get sanded down every eight years, that consistency is rare, and people respond to it.”Piggly Wiggly was founded in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1916 by Clarence Saunders.Saunders pioneered the then-unheard-of concept of modern self-service grocery shopping, according to the company’s website.

Before Piggly Wiggly, shoppers typically presented their orders to clerks, who gathered the goods from store shelves.The self-service concept proved wildly successful, helping Piggly Wiggly grow from a single Memphis store into a nationwide chain with more than 1,200 locations by 1923.Today, there are more than 500 Piggly Wiggly stores across 18 states.The o...