Saturday Superstore
The Great British shopping experience as it had been known for generations received its first vision of the future at precisely the halfway point of the twentieth century – when Sainsbury’s opened their first self-service ‘supermarket’ in 1950. The location of this landmark was the innocuous environs of Croydon, South London. The company’s soon-to-be Chairman, Alan Sainsbury, had visited the USA in the late 40s and had seen for himself the benefits that supermarkets could bring to the high-street; he envisaged the arrival of such a revolutionary form of retail in Britain as liberating shoppers from the traditional poky little British stores, giving them room to breathe and time to dawdle as they marvelled in the novelty of selecting their own goods without recourse to a hard-pressed shopkeeper.
Perhaps the visionary Mr Sainsbury surmised that supermarkets were precisely what the country required as the dismal cloud of the 40s threatened to hover over the new decade, although it’s doubtful whether even he could have foreseen how his Croydon guinea pig would prove to be the blueprint for every radical leap forward in the retail sector for the following fifty years. The impact on the corner-shops of Britain as supermarkets slowly began to appear in every major British town and city as the 50s progressed was felt gradually; but the arrival of ITV five years after the arrival of the first supermarket would lead to a rapid colonisation of the high-street by supermarkets as commercials were pumped directly into the nation’s living rooms for the first time, loudly advertising products that, in many cases, could only be found down the aisles of supermarkets. As the ITV network spread across the country in the late 50s, the supermarket mantra went nationwide.
Supermarkets benefitted hugely from television advertising, in a way that the corner-shop could never emulate. And the supermarkets were instrumental in transforming the eating habits of the nation by introducing the likes of the frozen ready-made meal, easing the burden on the housewife at teatime, but gradually changing the diet of Britons as a consequence. By the 1960s, supermarkets were established as a commonplace element of the high-street shopping trip, with most elevated to household name status – Tesco, the Co-Op, Spar, Finefare – and the largest provincial high-streets boasting several of them alongside the more traditional family firms of butchers, grocers and greengrocers. The saviours of the corner-shop, who kept it alive in the years following the urban redevelopment of the 60s and 70s, were enterprising Asian immigrants, who proceeded to revitalise a failing format by extending opening hours – particularly on Sundays – and branching-out into new areas such as home-video rentals, reminding people there was always an alternative to the supermarket on their doorstep, especially for those without personal transport – for car ownership would be the key to the next stage of the supermarket revolution.
Come the 1970s, television advertising and the supermarket were established enough fixtures for a generation to have risen with precious little knowledge that their pre-eminence within the culture of the country was a relatively new development. A clear sign that the supermarket was going from strength-to-strength came when the high-street was regarded as an unfit environment for containing the ambition of newcomers to the brand, such as Asda, a company originating in Leeds. In the early 70s, Asda began to open a string of huge superstores or ‘hypermarkets’ away from the cramped clutter of the high-street and geographically isolated from the competition. Just as the high-street supermarkets had undercut the corner-shop, the new superstores undercut the high-street supermarkets by offering an even greater range of goods at even cheaper prices. The ‘hyper’ prefix to these awesome retail monoliths came from the fact that they combined the traditional food-based stock of the supermarket with the wider selection of a department store, creating venues that housed all of the average shopper’s needs – needs that had always necessitated a trip to numerous different shops in the past – within the confines of one huge multi-purpose establishment. They were effectively a king-size corner-shop.
The precursor to the hypermarkets and superstores of the 70s had been the indoor shopping centres or ‘precincts’ of the 60s, although these were essentially glorified covered high-streets smack bang in the middle of town centres, with token trimmings to emphasise the ‘leisure’ experience such as nightclubs, restaurants, cinemas, hotels and bowling alleys. The most famous (or infamous) of this brave new breed was Birmingham’s Bull Ring Centre, which was officially opened in 1964. Covering 23 acres, the Bull Ring contained all the amenities that had been present amongst the original markets and businesses that had previously stood on the site as well as the aforementioned innovations, and was heralded as the future of British shopping. Very much a product of its era, the Brutalist behemoth of the Bull Ring was an intimidating concrete island, surrounded by traffic and only accessible on foot via a complex series of subways, walkways and escalators; moreover, the vastness of the Bull Ring was disproportionate to its surroundings.
The aesthetic blight of Manchester’s gargantuan Arndale Centre (opened in 1975) received especially virulent condemnation from architectural critics like Dan Cruickshank, who viewed the Arndale Centre as embodying the ‘brutal obliteration’ of British town centres; the notoriously ugly exterior was famously described by The Guardian as ‘the longest lavatory wall in Europe’. Many of the city centre shopping precincts’ add-on leisure gimmicks that had been sold as novel attractions in the beginning were quietly closed within a few years and converted to shops in the hope that nobody would notice. But the notion of a huge, sprawling shopping complex containing every conceivable outlet under one roof didn’t die with the failures of the 60s and 70s city centre precincts; in the future, the out-of-town hypermarkets and the shopping precinct concept would combine to create a retail monster.
Long a fixture of American popular culture, the shopping mall was the 60s shopping precinct taken to a frightening new level. Mainly situated out-of-town (like their hypermarket predecessors), the British malls began to sprout up across the country to cater for the 90s consumer boom, although the first recognisable inkling had appeared in the mid-80s, with the birth of the Metro Centre in Gateshead, near Newcastle, and Westfield Merry Hill near Dudley in the West Midlands. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the rapidly commonplace shopping malls were approached with an almost reverential awe by their patrons, enforcing the notion that these sterile temples of frivolity were the new houses of God – as long as God was a chain-store. For the traditional high-street, the mall was a monster it couldn’t compete with, so the only option was to throw in its lot with the enemy. As the big name stores gradually vacated their cramped old premises and moved to expansive new locations in the mall, town centres slowly embarked upon an agonising descent into dereliction, losing the motorist as a customer and leaving the pedestrian shopper with an increasingly limited choice.
Since the economic crash of 2008, however, there has been a noticeable downsizing by the big supermarket chains, with closures and redundancies a-plenty as budget-priced newcomers such as Aldi have found favour with hard-pressed shoppers and the old weekly shopping expedition for many has been superseded by daily trips on foot to the proliferation of small convenience stores, many of which are situated on the street corners of urban neighbourhoods. We appear to be back where we began.
Petunia Winegum
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August 22, 2015 at 9:37 am -
” … alongside the more traditional family firms of butcher’s, grocer’s and greengrocer’s. ”
A fine collection of greengrocer’s apostrophes.
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August 22, 2015 at 9:50 am -
Revolting pedants alert! Duly noted.
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August 22, 2015 at 10:23 am -
Or even “Revolting pedant’s alert.”
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August 22, 2015 at 10:51 am -
August 22, 2015 at 11:53 am -
Depends how many pedants.
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August 22, 2015 at 3:05 pm -
How many pedants would you like?
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August 22, 2015 at 10:49 am -
The uses and abuses of capitalism. Discuss. Often times in the past I eall into that cliche which is so often full of truth – cash rich and time poor. Nowadays it is more cash poor and time poor, but that is another matter. However, I do find the sheer convenience of the local mega Tesco 24/7 an absolute boon. But at the same time whenever possible I but my meat/poultry and veg from a greengrocer in a nearby village. This is not altogether out of altruism, although helping the local economy. It is also about quality and price. I find the quality of the meat and poultry altogether superior, I know roughly where it has come from, and it seems to me to be not insignificantly better value than the “free range” stuff at the supermarket. I do worry about the source of supermarket meat and poultry – I read horror stories of battery farms which distress me. Although I am not yet ready to make the jump to veggie, I do think we owe it to animals to make sure that if we are going to kill them and eat them, at least they have had a quality of life.
Another thing happens when I visit these local shops – something curiously unknown in some parts of modern life. It is called “social inter action”, and this describes a process where people actually talk to each other, in a “physical way”, emitting sounds which the other party can hear. It used to be quite popular years ago, before the world went mad and someone invented the interweb. For example, last time I went to the butchers I had an interesting chat not only about the miserable weather, but about fishing adventures at a local lake, and on another occasion about the origin of the name of my so called US navy pea coat.
On another, slightly odd note, I often have curious musings in the supermarket. One is: what would happen if the supply chain broke down, and the shelves were not stacked for a week or two? Anarchy and breakdown, I suspect. Many of us are so dependent on the great and complex system which works, often unseen, 24 hours a day, to fill shelves with our food and drink. It has always seemed to me to be a fragile system, vulnerable to attack, but perhaps that’s just my paranoid, depressive side.
On another note, the ruthless competition between brands is an exercise in natural selection par excellence. Are Tesco and Sainsbury’s the Brontosaurus and and Diplodocus of the shopping world, grown huge and fat in a benign environment, only to be hunted down and eaten by the fast moving velociraptors called Lidle and Aldi? It appears, by the way, that velociraptors had definite feather like appendages and were brightly coloured. This beginning the line which developed into birds, it would seem.
On that curious not, I bid you all a happy Saturday. -
August 22, 2015 at 12:01 pm -
I remember an intermediate stage, where eastern European emigres ran corner shops in the traditional ‘shopkeeper serves’ mode. The Indian corner shops followed the self-service paradigm.
Large supermarkets took trade from all those little shops because they were a one-stop solution with loads of free parking, and local authorities conspired to accelerate the death of town centre shopping with parking restrictions in both numbers of spaces and costs. Tesco and Sainsburys exterminated the smaller dinosaurs like Safeway, Somerfield and Gateway, opening up an environmental niche for Lidl and Aldi.
I remember when British Leyland decided to cut small dealerships free, thus giving an immediate entry to the UK market for Japanese car firms. It seems that large organisations exhibit some of the stupidities of state-run ‘enterprises’.
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August 22, 2015 at 7:05 pm -
“It seems that large organisations exhibit some of the stupidities of state-run `enterprises’.”
That is because the problem is size, not whether the enterprise is State or Private. The bigger any organisation gets, the harder it is to keep it working.
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August 22, 2015 at 12:02 pm -
In parallel with all this over the past 50 years, and possibly enabling much of it, we saw the huge growth of personal transport and the dramatic increase in working women, bringing greater wealth to the masses of families. Add to that all town and city centres becoming deliberately car-unfriendly and it’s no surprise that local shops fell victim to the allure of more distant, but accessible larger stores and malls.
With the new growth of on-line shopping, we now see out-of-town superstores being challenged, as folk buy their more expensive, and profitable, things via the global cobweb, often first using the physical stores only for a free ‘look & feel’.
The retail environment continues to change, as its customers continue to change: there will be failures (Woolworths etc) and survivors – it’s just a reflection of, and sometimes the stimulant to, social change all around.-
August 22, 2015 at 12:29 pm -
Not just working women Mudplugger, but women with cars…
When your day included a ‘walk’ to the shops, and the inevitable ‘carry’ home, the tendency to over shop was curtailed by natural selection – you only bought as much as you could carry.
Now you are provided with a trolley on wheels to do your shopping (and in most supermarkets a motorised car to drive yourself up and down those aisles) then a car to carry it home for you.
Women have got fatter and fatter in response to these two factors.
Walk to the shops, and you won’t overeat…the Raccoon diet, infallible.-
August 22, 2015 at 7:06 pm -
“Walk to the shops, and you won’t overeat…” – but you might work up a massive appetite.
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August 22, 2015 at 8:24 pm -
That’s true. When my non-working, non-driving, cash-strapped mother was raising us, she shopped daily at the street-end independents based on her weight capacity, carrying the half stone of spuds, carrots etc. (complete with farm-muck still attached, for which she’d paid!), cramming it into the push-chair with the younger, while the elder toddler walked alongside. Once a week, it was the mile-and-a-half walk into the local town centre (saving on bus-fares), again only being able to buy what she could afford and and what she and her two brats could somehow carry home. Every few weeks was a bus trip into the city 5 miles away, no push-chair this time, just two nippers in tow. Twice a year, a train-trip to the bigger city for an all-day trawl, which we two kids found quite boring, except the big toy-shop, although little there was affordable to us, it was exciting just to look. Dad, of course, was not involved in the process – women did shopping.
That’s how it was in the 50s – how it’s changed. On balance it’s much better now, there’s far more choice, if only because you can get to it, and despite what the naysayers bleat, there’s far more wealth even amongst the relatively poor, so the chance if choice exists much further down the food-chain, but many don’t realise it or exercise it wisely.-
August 24, 2015 at 8:48 am -
That all sounds familiar, MudPlugger, but for us there was one more important trip – the once-a-year trek to a larger town nearby (in our case, Stratford via the number 93 Green Line bus) to visit Santa’s grotto in the big department store there – the name of which, to my chagrin, I have temporarily forgotten. So exciting; nearly London but not quite – London itself, despite its proximity, was visited only for the big West End museums and the Proms, which then had not been dumbed down by the bbc.
In some ways those were better days, but in many other ways they were not. Think “dentistry” for a start…
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August 24, 2015 at 8:59 am -
No thanks for the reminder of early NHS dentistry – all those recently-demobbed military dentists with evil-smelling breath and a chair-side manner akin to the Gestapo, usually accompanied by a Rosa Klebb lookalike assistant, and the foul smell of that gas-mask, the trip home on the bus with a scarf wrapped across your wounded face…..
And on Thursday this week, I’m due for my 21st century dental hygienist appointment – and that’s still legalised torture, dressed-up as therapy, but at least she’s better-looking.-
August 24, 2015 at 10:07 am -
That rings an unwelcome bell. The dentist throughout my childhood was called Grunwell, a surname that easily leant itself to the prefix ‘Herr’.
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August 24, 2015 at 11:21 am -
In a bizarre and long-lasting consistency, my regular dentist throughout all my long life has been called Bastard, even the occasionally attractive female ones – OK, maybe only silently nominated thus in my tortured brain, but the epithet resounds around in it whenever I’m locked into that evil chair of horror. The hurtful fact that I have to pay them afterwards only serves to emphasise the overall pain inflicted on so many levels.
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August 22, 2015 at 1:21 pm -
Another joy of dealing with the owner of the business is that he realises you’re a regular. In our case we have an excellent local butcher; a family business which also has its own slaughterhouse. They therefore know the real cost of what they’re selling and we often benefit from much lower prices than the supermarkets on meat which is rarely less than superb.
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August 22, 2015 at 2:06 pm -
Exactly so. And they can give advise about what’s particularly good, or about the best cuts to buy. I was going to make a casserole a few weeks ago and I was directed to the appropriate joint, and away from one which would have not worked so well.
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August 22, 2015 at 8:39 pm -
The optimum approach now is to use the independents for those specialised items such as meat, fish, breads etc., but use the multiples for the ‘no-difference’ products. A kilo of granulated sugar is a kilo of granulated sugar, whether you buy it from Aldi, Waitrose or the corner-shop, so that sort of item can be bought purely on price.
But all our raw meat and fish, for example, comes from the specialist independents – it may be more expensive per pound than the supermarkets, but the bacon doesn’t boil itself in a steaming, festering, grey and watery gloop, the beef actually tastes of beef and the fish hadn’t left Grimsby, or the sea, too long ago. As Gildas reports below, your friendly local expert will guide his regular customers to the best products that day, which can enhance your apparent cooking skills considerably. Value isn’t just about price.
The trick is to be a savvy shopper, use the best-of-breed for the different products and services to create your own value-equation.
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August 22, 2015 at 3:20 pm -
When I was growing up and lived at home, my parents exclusively patronised the local shops: Dad was a self-made businessman and it was a point of honour to only shop at the independents. Later, I broke away from parental influence and, thereafter, spent the rest of my life as an itinerant expat. At some point during the early 70s, I was back in UK and went shopping with my mother. In foreign lands, it was commonplace to pick up and examine the produce before deciding what to buy. When I took my mother to a self-service UK supermarket, and did the same, she was horrified: “You can’t do that!”. She was inured to getting what she was given. But, of course, none of the local independents would’ve dared to short-change her, given Dad’s connections.
In the far-flung places where I have lived, I’ve received the same preferential treatment from local traders that I regularly patronised. If there was a shortage (and there often was), there would be something saved ‘under the counter’ for the regulars.
Alas, a supermarket doesn’t care whether or not you are a regular — other than being able to cull your personal data if you have a loyalty card.
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August 22, 2015 at 3:59 pm -
As a soft southerner, my first move was to Bolton, ’71, where there was what was to me in those days a huge Asda at Astley Bridge; sold everything from sugar to sports jackets. Then there was Scan at Walkden. Amazing places, LPs at knockdown prices, real stuff, not compilations. Came across malls in the US, later in RSA; Menlo Park, Sandton City & later Eastgate And now it’s all here.
In my own Downland village huge local opposition was raised against a plan to treble the size of the ‘saintly brand’ supermarket in the village centre. Same formula they’ve used everywhere else to impose their presence, apparently traffic won’t increase, it’ll be good for us, save the High Street, etc.
Now all is quiet. Nobody knows what’s happening except it seems unlikely that the new cathedral will be built; information’s hard to come by.
Oddly though nobody’s starving in the streets because of the lack of supermarket floor space, and I’ve never seen a queue at the door of the apparently inadequate present unit.
And all those new jobs? They never were going to pay that much & part time at that- now being self service tilled away.-
August 22, 2015 at 5:57 pm -
“And all those new jobs? They never were going to pay that much & part time at that- now being self service tilled away.”
Even as we speak, supermarket executives are scratching their heads trying to find a way to persuade customers to unpack the delivery trucks and stack the shelves….
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August 22, 2015 at 6:01 pm -
Maybe that’s why so many supermarket employees appear to be…well…a bit…er…’special needs’, shall we say?
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August 22, 2015 at 7:48 pm -
I think it depends on the supermarket. The town I used to live in had the most depressing supermarkets with staff that were, if not exactly rude, then certainly not friendly. It took fifteen years to get them to grunt “allo agin” when I went in. Moving back to the town in which I was brunged up was a delight, if only because the second time I visited the branch of the same supermarket chain, I was greeted with a cheery “Hello again!”. All the staff are cheery and helpful (well, there’s one grump….), which makes the chore of the weekly basics shop almost something to look forward to.
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August 22, 2015 at 9:35 pm -
One of my kids went to school for those unfortunate enough to often have a fairly acute level of ‘Special Needs’ and as a result we got involved with many local parents who were often at their wits end as to what the future might hold for their kids. Those local supermarkets, and suchlike, which were prepared to employ their children were a Godsend
This drinking hall seems to be happy to accept all types, from all parts of the spectrum of lunacy and, often, just plain bad taste in respect of both humour and manners – I’ll plead guilty to offending on both those counts – but on this one I’ll call you out
Unless, of course, you have some suitable alternative solution? Barbed wire camps with goon towers, perhaps. All located in Norfolk, of course. Might as well place them where the greatest need is to be found.
But if you do, expect the ghosts of the Mighty Eighth to rise from the grave and bomb the hell out of you
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August 22, 2015 at 9:45 pm -
I had noticed each supermarket in the vicinity tends to have one genuine ‘special needs’ employee, and I did wonder if there’d been a conscious effort to recruit them, which is indeed admirable. But there are usually three or four employees who have no excuses for their uniquely unwelcoming blend of ignorance and stupidity that makes them very ‘special’.
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August 22, 2015 at 9:55 pm -
I expected better than that…
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August 22, 2015 at 9:59 pm -
I’m not talking about genuine what-is-called ‘special needs’ – see my modified comment (modified when I realised it could be misconstrued). I’m talking about just basically thick and rude individuals who tend to be employed by supermarkets and didn’t attend special schools and aren’t classified as ‘special needs’. I’ll get me coat…
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August 22, 2015 at 10:05 pm -
Ok. That’s fair do’s
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August 22, 2015 at 10:33 pm -
That said, a local branch of Asda about 15 years ago employed a genuinely ‘special needs’ young guy, Jason, on the deli counter. He was the happiest, liveliest, most personable and enthusiastic of all the staff there – many of the customers, especially elderly ladies, deliberately chose to be served by him (my mother was one of them). He made an impact even on a cynical type like me, I even remember his name after all this time, which is more than can be said for any of the other drones.
It was a wonderful example of how ‘different’ people can fit in, providing employers are prepared to take a chance on them – there’s no doubt he was far more appreciative of having the job than most of his colleagues there and it showed. I suspect the store manager had fewer personnel problems with him than the rest.
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August 23, 2015 at 9:04 am -
My daughter was born (1972, before they routinely tested) with a non functioning thyroid gland. By the time it was detected, she had suffered brain damage. The official term is mild cretinism.
Through the efforts of the Shaw Trust she was given an opportunity to work at Sainsburys. This was over 20 years ago. During this time she has been treated well by the Company and given training so that she can work at many different jobs in various departments. With my cynical head on, I am sure it helps Sainsburys with their disabled employment numbers. Whatever their reason I am eternally grateful that they have given her a job which is both fulfilling and interesting. I am no great fan of the large supermarkets but it probably takes an organisation of Sainsburys size to provide the job opportunities to help people like my daughter.
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August 22, 2015 at 4:53 pm -
I have visited both the “Bull Ring” and “Merry Hill” sites – I found them depressing beyond belief. And was not able to buy anything there that I could not buy in Worcester, near to where I live. Both places were just like any high street in any large town or city, with exactly the same selection of shops. As for trying to figure out which car park to use at Merry Hill, I just gave up and went home, vowing that I would never go near the place again. The idea that they offer a wider choice is just an illusion. People living in Worcester used to boast about going to Cheltenham for a day out shopping. Once again, I did not find anything there that I could not get locally.
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August 23, 2015 at 10:22 pm -
They don’t call it Merry Hell for nothing.
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August 22, 2015 at 5:58 pm -
Brent Cross. There, I’ve said it. The Waitrose and M&S yummy mummy magnet of a shopping centre, and the only place where I’ve ever been asked if my dress watch, when buying a replacement strap for it, was made of real gold. (It was bought in Hong Kong yonks ago and was certainly priced as real…)
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August 22, 2015 at 8:03 pm -
On balance, I think supermarkets have been a good thing. True, there’s a friendliness about the small shops, but their choice of stock was sometimes limited and sometimes dictated by what the shopkeeper decided you were going to buy. Back in the day, some butchers could get away with all sorts of dodgy scams because they were the only one in town; now they have to be better than the supermarkets, or nobody would buy anything off them.
That’s one thing the supermarkets have given us – choice. Even the smaller branches stock a huge range, and if you want real quality you can still go to the independents. There’s a town in south Shropshire called Ludlow, which was famed for having a good range of independent traders and no supermarket. There was much angst when a national chain set up a supermarket in the town, but far from killing the independents it ended up complimenting them – the locals bought their loo rolls and washing-up liquid in the supermarket, but still went to one of the butchers in town for their home-made sausages and pies, and their Sunday joint. Not true everywhere, but if the independents are good enough, they’ll survive and thrive. If they’re not good enough, they probably deserve to be overtaken by the competition.
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August 22, 2015 at 9:28 pm -
Good article- but while Sainsbury may well have opened the first self service store in 1950, it was not the first supermarket. I worked at Cadby Hall (next to Kensington Olympia) for a couple of years in the early 1970s, and the Lyons Supermarket that graced the corner of Hammersmith Rd and Blythe Rd was acknowledged as the first supermarket in the UK, opening in 1950 or 1951. My first experience of Sainsbury’s were that they were small, and the shop we used in Portobello Rd was not self service. Far from it, even eggs were sold from glass fronted shelves and packed in brown paper bags by the counter staff. My memory tells me that the Lyons Supermarket took some time to catch on. People did not like the idea of helping themselves. After all, that was what the staff were there for- to serve you- the customer, not just sit at a till and chat to the staff on the next till about what they were getting up to that evening (or else recounting what they’d got up to the night before)
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August 22, 2015 at 10:27 pm -
Supermarkets weren’t responsible for promoting frozen foods because no-one had anywhere to keep them once bought.
The ‘frozen food’ revolution was led by Bejam, Iceland’s predecessor, that was unique in having freezer cabinets to store the food AND freezer cabinets for sale to the customer.
Aldi and Lidl hardly represent a return to the high street or corner store. They are invariably built on brown field sites re-purposed for retail trading. High streets continue to be dominated by charity shops and estate agents. The corner shop is non-existent, having long since been converted to housing.
There might be more people shopping more than once in a week but that is probably down to gluttony or inability to plan or recall to mind what was needed. Unless a shop has convenient free car parking nearby, (excludes most high streets and corner shops), it won’t survive, regardless of how small each sale is. Most people don’t walk to the shops.
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August 22, 2015 at 10:44 pm -
There’s an unfortunate truth in the ‘inability to plan’ notion. It afflicts most of the under 40s who have grown up with permanent communication available, which allows them to make, unmake and re-make all arrangements on the fly. Those of us from earlier times did not have the means to ‘unmake’ any arrangement, so once planned we were committed to it. This new ad-hoc lifestyle format then leaks over into all other aspects of life, one of which will certainly be the planning of provisions, where 24-hour, 7-day operation also provides an escape for any planning inadequacy – another facility which we oldies never had when growing up. And because the younger group have those escape routes, so no penalty, they’ll never learn to plan like we did.
(Or maybe we’re just boring old farts, jealous of their more spontaneous freedom.) -
August 22, 2015 at 11:39 pm
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August 22, 2015 at 10:36 pm -
>Pet. This isn’t meant to appear as if having a pop at you. I had it drafted on my phone and lost it, before our brief exchange above
This is the second attempt… LOLI’m not sure that you really have got to 3/4, or even 2/3 of ‘full circle’, and I certainly wouldn’t wish what I would perceive that to that to be on my children, or theirs
From the time I was about 7 or so, Saturday afternoon consisted of two trips to the local ‘Co-opie’, entrusted with the family shopping bag and a chunk of the weekly shopping budget, one trip being to the ‘butter side’ and the other to the ‘sugar side’. There I would queue for some indeterminate period of time until it was ‘my turn’ to go through the pencilled list, one item at a time, while the chap at the other side of the counter would retrieve each, pop it down in front of me, and then ask for what he should get next. After all was done, then, using a piece of paper and a pencil, he would add it up and I would hand over the cash, subsequently to lug it all home. Sure, it taught me a few things, but I can still remember being bored to death with the whole palaver, and not even the 2d sachet of Nestle that I got for personal consumption (anyone else remember those?), a luxury in a household of teadrinkers, made up for it
And that doesn’t even get close to describing how awful the mid-day Saturday trips to the Co-Opie baker were
When Coopers (the Scots version of FineFare- no-one would have then been as daft as believe in that anything with a pretentious name like that would be worth a visit) opened three units along the block, to my everlasting gratitude, most of the drudgery of shopping could be avoided. Apart, that is, from the hassle that went with those [insert suitable swear word] S&H Pink Stamps.
OK, today, electronic gizmos could at least be used to minimise the unremitting boredom and grind which might otherwise assault the offspring if they had to do likewise but, frankly, we are nowhere near full circle to that and, if you maybe have any fond aspirations after the notion of a ‘better’ past, you can go there yourself, or with whichever other brown bag hugging numpties are prepared to follow you
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