I zipped through the grocery store the other day picking up a few things. A quick walk through the aisles yielded a half-gallon of milk, a jar of pickles, a package of hamburger, a box of rice and a couple of thick-cut pork chops, wrapped in their foam tray.
Waiting in the checkout lane, it dawned on me: It didn’t use to be this way.
Grocery shopping when I was a kid was a different clambake altogether. Admittedly, that was (mumble-mumble) years ago, so change is not unexpected. The thing that hit me, was just how much it has changed.
Walking through the aisles for instance. Admittedly, our store back then had a couple of aisles where you could more or less serve yourself. That’s where they kept the block salt and the bins of potatoes. Most everything else was on shelves behind the counter. The clerk retrieved them for you, sometimes using a long pole.
Sometimes Mom just handed he clerk her grocery list and he filled the whole shebang. He also delivered to our door later in the day, carried everything in and even put the perishables into the fridge.
We didn’t buy milk at the grocery. It came from the dairy, delivered in glass quart bottles. I don’t know when larger containers came on the scene. The first paper cartons were covered with wax and sometimes leaked.
Pickles didn’t come in jars either. They came in large barrels filled with brine. The pickles floated around like fish. The clerk retrieved them with tongs.
In the meat department the clerks worked behind a glass case slicing and dicing with fancy saws and sharp knives. They ground your hamburger while you waited. Same for pork chops. Your meat was carefully wrapped in heavy paper and tied with string.
Rice, flour, dry beans and sugar came in large burlap bags and the clerk scooped it into cartons for you, a pound at a time.
There weren’t any barcodes back then, so the clerk had to figure your grocery bill with a pencil and a piece of paper. And the cash register was usually a big burly piece of machinery that rang a bell when it was opened. Some even operated with a crank instead of electricity.
No one asked “paper or plastic” either. The clerk loaded everything into paper bags or – more often than not – into Mom’s grocery basket.
Today we swipe a credit card. Back then we paid in cash or, since most folks got paid once a month, our purchase was added to our bill and paid in full at the end of the month.
And, oh yeah, one more thing has changed: Hamburger was only 19-cents a pound back then.
