IMAGINATION 391As our first illustration of the power of Imagination in modern
business achievement, take the case of Clarence Saunders who organized
the Piggly-Wiggly system of self-help grocery stores.
Saunders was a grocery clerk in a small southern retail store. One day
he was standing in a line, with a tin tray in his hands, waiting his turn to
get food in a cafeteria. He had never earned more than twenty dollars a
week before that time, and no one had ever noticed anything about him
that indicated unusual ability, but something took place in his mind, as
he stood in the line of waiting people, that put his Imagination to work.
With the aid of his Imagination he lifted that "self-help" idea out of
the cafeteria (not creating anything new, but merely shifting an old idea
into a new use) and he set it down in a grocery store. In an instant the
Piggly-Wiggly chain-store grocery plan had been created, and Clarence
Saunders, the twenty-dollar-a-week grocery clerk, rapidly became the
million-dollar chain-store groceryman of America.
Where in that transaction do you see the slightest indication of a
performance that you could not duplicate?
Analyze the transaction and measure it by the previous lessons of
this course and you will see that Clarence Saunders had created a very
definite purpose. He supported this purpose with a sufficient degree of
Self-Confidence to cause him to take the Initiative to transform it into
reality. His Imagination was the workshop in which these three factors
-a Definite Chief Aim, Self-Confidence, and Initiative-were brought
together and they supplied him with the momentum for the first step
in the organization of the Piggly-Wiggly plan.
Thus are great ideas changed into realities.
COMMENTARY
A few years later, Sylvan Goldman, who owned several Piggly-Wiggly stores in
Oklahoma, noticed his customers struggling to carry everything in small baskets.
One night, while trying to figure out how to enable them to purchase more at one