Supermarkets have long been suffering as one of the thinnest-margined businesses in existence and one of the least-looked-forward-to places to work or visit.

For more than a decade, they have been under attack from e-commerce giants, blamed for making Americans fat, and accused of contributing to climate change.

Supermarkets can technically be defined as giants housing 15,000 to 60,000 different products.

The revolutionary idea of a self-service grocery, where people could hunt and gather food from aisles rather than asking a clerk to fetch items from behind a counter, first came about in America.

There is some debate about which was the very first, but over the years a consensus has built around King Kullen Supermarket, founded in New York in 1930.

For some 300 years, Americans had fed themselves from small stores and public markets.

Shopping for food involved mud, noisy chickens, clouds of flies, nasty smells, bargaining, and getting short-changed.

The supermarket imitated the Fordist factory, with its emphasis on efficiency and standardization, and reimagined it as a place to buy food.

Supermarkets may not feel cutting-edge now, but they were a revolution in distribution at the time.

They were such strange marvels that, on her first official state visit to the United States in 1957, Queen Elizabeth II insisted on an impromptu tour of a suburban-Maryland Giant Food.