4 Piggly Wiggly Traditions Alabama Shoppers Grew Up With That Are Disappearing
Homewood’s Piggly Wiggly marked down whatever was left on the shelves and locked its doors at six o’clock on the last night of 2025.
That store gets to come back.
The city expects a bigger store on the same corner by the end of this year, which is more than most Alabama towns hear after the Pig closes.
These are the Piggly Wiggly traditions Alabama shoppers grew up with that are on their way out or already out.
1. Circling the Weekly Ad
Piggly Wiggly shoppers in Alabama have always had something to clip, scan, or circle before a grocery run.
Four stores in central Alabama opened without any of it.
Piggly Wiggly Food For Less landed in Prattville, in Wetumpka, and in two spots in Montgomery between November and February, and it prices everything at cost plus 10%.
You pay what the store paid, and a tenth on top of it.
By the company’s own description, that setup does away with coupons, loyalty cards, and promotions.
No card to scan.
The family behind those four stores runs its chain out of Panama City, Florida.
About 70 people opened the Vaughn Road store in Montgomery, and most of them had already been working a grocery job in that same building.
What you can’t do at those stores is plan the week around a sale.
2. Groceries Without Leaving Town
In a lot of small Alabama towns, the Pig was the grocery store, and no second store sat down the road as a backup.
The Cherokee store closed at the end of December in 2024, and its owner said the economy and a drop in sales left her no choice.
She put the place up for sale, hoping somebody would take it over and keep the doors open for the town.
A grocery run turned into a longer drive for residents.
The closest grocery stores sit in Tuscumbia, a good 18 miles east, or across the state line in Iuka, Mississippi, where the tax on food runs higher.
Neighbors said they worried most about the older people in Cherokee who couldn’t make that trip.
3. One Owner, One Store
Many Piggly Wiggly stores in Alabama answer to an owner who lives nearby, since the company licenses its name to independent grocers who run their stores their own way.
That’s the charm of the Pig, and it’s the fragile part.
Aliceville’s store closed in May 2021 after 65 years, when its owner retired.
Nobody bought it.
A national chain hands a store to the next manager on the list.
An owner in Pickens County has to find a stranger willing to take on the whole thing, the store, the coolers, and the payroll.
About 2,400 people live in Aliceville.
A store called Food Fair became the main place to buy groceries once the Pig closed.
The old building was set to become a warehouse.
More than 30 people worked at that Piggly Wiggly.
One cashier had been there 29 years.
4. Walking to the Pig
Phenix City’s oldest Piggly Wiggly opened in Phenix Plaza on 13th Street, close enough for people in the apartments behind it to walk over with a list.
JTM Corporation, the family company behind the Piggly Wiggly stores around Phenix City, announced in February 2026 that the store would close.
It pointed to years of operating losses, equipment that needed replacing, and a month-to-month lease it couldn’t count on.
The company offered its 20 employees spots at other Piggly Wiggly stores in the area.
It hadn’t named a final closing date.
The same owners had already closed their Lanett store in early 2025, after the rent went up in its shopping center.
The two Piggly Wigglys left in Phenix City sit about two and a half miles from Phenix Plaza, out on the 280 bypass and over on Stadium Drive.
Bring your car.
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Tax on Your Buggy
Alabama used to tax the food in your buggy at the same state rate it charged for a lawn mower.
The state rate on groceries fell from 4% to 3% in September 2023, and Act 2025-305 cut it again to 2% on September 1, 2025.
On a $200 buggy of food, the state's share dropped from $8 to $4.
Then it hit zero.
Act 2026-604 suspended the state grocery tax entirely from May 1 through June 30 this year, and the 2% came back on July 1.
City and county food taxes ran the whole time, suspension or not.
Those local rates differ from one town to the next.
So the same buggy of groceries rings up one way in Cullman and another way in Dothan.
Who Owns the Pig
The pig on the sign belongs to a company in Keene, New Hampshire.
Piggly Wiggly, LLC sells the franchises and hands its operators marketing programs, promotional items, and support.
It's an affiliate of C&S Wholesale Grocers, headquartered in the same town, and more than 500 stores carry the name today across 18 states.
C&S isn't purely a wholesaler anymore, either.
It closed a $1.77 billion purchase of SpartanNash in September 2025, which brought more than 200 corporate-run supermarkets into the company.
Some of them are Pigs.
C&S names D&W Fresh Market, Grand Union, Family Fare, Martin's Super Markets, and Piggly Wiggly as the banners on its own stores.
Those company-run Pigs sit up in the Midwest, not in Alabama.
Co-op in Bessemer
Twenty-seven Piggly Wiggly owners pooled their buying power in 1959 and built a wholesale company of their own.
It still runs out of Bessemer.
Piggly Wiggly Alabama Distributing Company says it supplies more than 240 stores across seven states in the Southeast.
Bulk buying is the point.
The co-op also warehouses their groceries, produces their advertising, and backs them up on the retail side.
In October 2025, it started offering members an online ordering platform.
So a grocer with a single store can take web orders without building the website.
How Saunders Lost It
Piggly Wiggly grew faster than Clarence Saunders could hold on to it.
By 1923 the chain ran 1,268 stores and sold $100 million in groceries a year, which made it the third largest grocery business in the country.
Then Saunders tried to corner his own company's stock on the New York Stock Exchange.
He lost, resigned, and filed for bankruptcy.
He spent the rest of his life on the Keedoozle, a grocery store where a shopper put a key in a slot beside a display window and machines dropped the order onto a conveyor belt.
It never turned a profit.
Saunders died in October 1953, still tinkering with the machine.
Asked once why he gave the stores such an odd name, he said it was so people would ask that very question.
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