The emergence of supermarket is known as "the second revolution of retail industry". The revolution's impact on people's lives has been so profound and pervasive that modern Westerners "find it hard to imagine life without supermarkets". The concept of a supermarket has varied over time and from place to place. Because our country supermarket development history is not long, so we do not fully understand it. Some people simply understand it as open shelf sales, but it is not. Supermarket was born in the United States in 1930, and in the early 1950s appeared in Europe and Asia, and in each country has been a rapid development. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the classical interpretations of foreign experts and scholars on supermarkets, among which the representative ones are:

In his book supermarket, American scholar M. M. Zimmerman defined a supermarket as follows: "A supermarket is a retail store that is highly departmenized and operates food or other commodities. It is either run entirely by the owner or by a commission. It has enough parking, it has a turnover of at least $250,000 a year, and it has to be self-service for dry goods, food, groceries."

In the book marketing Management, Philip Kotler defines a supermarket as "a self-service operation of considerable size, low cost and large volume, whose purpose is to meet the entire needs of customers for food, detergent and household products."

Supermarket goods are mainly food and groceries (accounting for more than 50%), the demand of these two commodities is relatively stable, accounting for a large proportion of the total retail sales of goods in the whole society.

Although there is no single definition of a supermarket, each one describes it from a different perspective, with a different emphasis.

Supermarket appeared late in Our country. In the early 1990s, the concept of "supermarket" was widely accepted. Drawing on the above foreign classical interpretations and combining with China's national conditions, the author believes that a supermarket can be defined as: a supermarket is a self-service and centralized one-time payment sales mode, mainly selling packaged food, fresh food and daily necessities, to meet consumers' needs for daily necessities of life.