“Back In The Day” Reflections–Grocery Stores
Many of the advertisements on this past Sunday’s Super Bowl telecast reflected on how life was “back in the day” and were somewhat nostalgic, thus, the inspiration for this post focusing on grocery stores.
Remembering my mom didn’t learn how to drive until I was twelve (not really knowing if she ever knew how to drive), my dad did all of the family grocery shopping. During this era, grocery shopping was done on a weekly basis supplemented during the week for a few staple items like bread, milk, and eggs.
Grocery store hours, as I remember, in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s were 9AM-9PM, Monday-Friday, and 9AM-6PM on Saturday, of course, being closed on Sunday. Dad and I would go grocery shopping on either Friday or Saturday and patronized an old A&P Grocery Store which was located on the same side of and close to the Arlington Movie Theater on Columbia Pike. It was a rather small store similar in size to other chains at that time and we’d always fill the grocery cart up with the weeks’ worth of groceries taking more than an hour from start to finish.
Being a youngster, I always looked forward to my riding in the grocery cart. If I was a good boy, and I always was, I’d get to hop on the coin operated horse ride located near the entrance of the grocery store along with the rack of gumball machines. Dad would pop a nickel in the horse ride and off I’d go galloping. Then he’d give me three pennies for me to raid the gumball machines. Being a good boy paid off, but there was one shopping trip when I wasn’t a good boy.
On this particular shopping trip, I recall my dad giving me a small paper bag from the produce department and “back in the day”, long before shelf labels, the grocery shelves just had small plastic numbers in them which were easily removable. I knew that because, on this day, as we traveled down all the grocery aisles, I was proudly taking all the plastic numbers off of the shelves and putting them in my small paper bag almost filling it to the top. After my dad loaded the groceries into our automobile in the parking lot and we hopped in, I showed him my bag filled with plastic numbers expecting to hear him say, “Well done, son!”. But, instead, he was beyond angry not being able to believe what I had done. We headed back into the store where my father presented the Store Manager with my bag of plastic numbers. The Store Manager’s eyes widened wider than I’d ever before witnessed and it was then my turn to apologize to the Store Manager. He was gracious, but I knew deep down he was really “pissed” finally understanding why. All I know is when we got home, I got my fanny tanned for that one.
In the late 1960’s when, as a teenager, I began working summers for Giant Food as a part-time produce clerk. Grocery stores were still closed on Sunday, but now stayed open until 9PM on Saturdays. All of the Giants were set up in the same way with produce being the first department. “Back in the day”, grocery stores didn’t have a service delly, nor pharmacies, and didn’t sell health and beauty aids (HBA). Of course, this was before computer-assisted checkouts, self-checkouts, packaged and convenient ready-to-eat foods, bulk foods, shelf labels, and Universal Product Codes (UPC’s).
As stated, the store layout at Giant began with the produce department, as you continued around the perimeter, the dairy and packaged meat department was next along the right side of the store, then the meat department along the backside, leading into the frozen food department on the left side, with the dry grocery department being in the center of the store. The checkouts were in the front of the store, and once you paid for your groceries either by only cash or check, you’d park your shopping cart out front filled with your bagged groceries, retrieve your automobile, and drive to the front of the store to the parcel pick-up area where your groceries were loaded in your vehicle by a clerk.
In the produce department, most all of the items were sold only in bulk. If any items were pre-packaged the packing took place within the store. The only items I recall being bagged were white potatoes in 5- and 10-pound bags and apples in 3-pound bags. We’d tray tomatoes and 3-pak corn in the store along with bagging items like lettuce, celery, and oranges. As a customer, you’d select your produce, place it in a paper bag, and if it was sold by the pound, go the scale where a produce clerk would weigh it and handwrite the price on the bag with a Listo which was a mechanical grease pencil.
“Back in the day”, private labeling hadn’t come to the forefront nor had product “sell by” dating. When you purchased your name brand dairy or delly items, the way you could tell if it was still good or not was by the good old-fashioned “smell” test. The dairy brand I remember most was Sealtest. With no service delly, all luncheon meats were also prepackaged and I recall a few of the most popular brands were Oscar Mayer, Briggs, Gwaltney, and Smithfield. Most hams were canned and the hams once you opened the can had this yucky jelly-like coating–gaarrross! If you wanted to splurge, you’d purchase a Hormel Cure 81 ham which were very tasty.
Coming across an experienced butcher today is rare as few truly exist. Today, you may run across what they now call a meatcutter, but really they’re clerks who put out meat products which are cut and packaged in a warehouse environment and shipped to the stores. Meatcutters came more to fruition when meat was no longer processed and broken down at store level with it being shipped in Cryovac vacuum shrunk bags having already been broken down merely having to be cut and packaged.
Being a butcher was a skilled trade which required years of experience. Meat used to be delivered to the stores via trailers in its primal state on meat hooks. “Back in the day” when a meat trailer arrived at your store, there was a built-in rail system, on an incline, which led from the trailer to the meat room cooler. The meat hooks were on rollers and were just pushed down the rail from the trailer to the cooler where this practice was termed “swinging meat”.
The initial stage of training to become a butcher lasted two years and the trainee was called an “apprentice”. After these first two years, the “apprentice” went through a series of tests where they were thoroughly evaluated before becoming a full-fledged butcher. At Giant Food, their career path, after becoming a butcher, was to be selected as a “first cutter” then leading to becoming a Meat Manager.
Once a meat trailer was received, the meat on the hooks was in its primal stage. Butchers would take these primal portions of meat and break them down into sub-primal cuts not only wearing steel mesh gloves, but also a steel mesh apron. Finally, the sub-primal cuts would be reduced to retail products and packaged for sale.
“Back in the day”, every item in both frozen food and dry grocery were individually priced using a Garvey hand stamper with purple ink. Shelf labels called unit price labels (UPL’s) didn’t come along until computer-assisted checkouts were rolled out and items being individually priced was discontinued. Pricing items individually and going through the process of changing product pricing using Kutzit ink remover was very labor intensive and costly especially when you changed thousands of prices during a grocery chain “price war”.
The Baby Boomer has always felt the two key positions working in a grocery store were those associates working in maintenance and those who were cashiers. There’s nothing more important than a clean store with bright, shiny, and glistening terrazzo floors, clean rest rooms, and outstanding front-end customer service.
While working as a Retail Trainee back in the 1970’s at Giant #131 (Bailey’s Crossroads), which happened to be one of the highest volume stores in the chain, we took great pride in the outstanding front-end customer service we provided to our customers. Our General Manager Dayle and Assistant Manager Joe made certain we kept our checkout lines short and opening as many if not all of our thirteen registers in order to accomplish this.
The registers “back in the day” were ones where you punched in the prices of the items on a keyboard and registering it by keying in the proper department. Customers paid by cash or check (no ATM’s back then) and needed to have a Giant Courtesy Card to pay by check where they could also get as much as $25.00 in cash back. Cashiers had to process the back of each check by stamping it and writing in the Courtesy Card number and also checking a listing on each register making certain the Courtesy Card wasn’t on the listing due to a previous check being returned for insufficient funds.
Giant Stores did begin to open when the Blue Laws were lifted being open from noon-5PM and initially not being able to sell beer or wine. OBTW, wine, “back in the day”, wasn’t yet very popular. I can recall only a small selection consisting of brands like Boone’s Farm, Taylor, Gallo, Italian Swiss Colony (always struck me as a bit odd), Bolla, Lancers, and Mateus. Beer selections were mostly domestic as there were a few offerings from Europe with Budweiser and Schlitz being the mainstays. No lite beer or craft beer way back then. But being open on Sunday didn’t initially bring in big sales, with banks being closed, Giant instead became a bank as customers just came in to cash their $25.00 checks.
The cashiers at Giant Food always looked very smart as there was a rather strict dress code which was readily followed or you wouldn’t be able to work. For gentlemen: white shirt, Giant blue tie, dress pants (no jeans), belt, socks, shined shoes (no tennis shoes), shorter hair, short sideburns, trimmed mustache (no beards), and short clean fingernails. For ladies: knee length dress, slacks, white blouse, close-toed shoes, clean hair tied back if below the shoulder, and Giant blue smock.
Our cashiers were the ones who made an everlasting impression on our customers as they had the greatest amount of “face time”. Cashiers were friendly and got to know their customers often by name always greeting them asking how their day was going. It certainly wasn’t like it is today when the first words from a cashier are “paper or plastic”. “Back in the day”, Giant cashiers not only rung you up and processed you transaction, but had to count change back when a customer paid by cash, and then they expertly bagged your groceries placing them in the customer’s cart.
Our best and most efficient cashiers would run the Express Line with ten items or fewer. Those lines were always very busy and a customer could only pay by using cash. It was also where you returned your soda bottles to get a refund on the deposit you initially paid.
At Giant #131, Hilda was the customers #1 cashier and always assigned to register #13 near where the frozen foods were located. Hilda often would have 8-10 customers waiting in her line. Even when you offered them the opportunity to move to a less crowded checkout they refused because they wanted Hilda and only Hilda. Yes, Hilda was German and spoke with an accent. Certainly, always the lady, she was in her 50’s and had been with Giant forever. She was always so well-dressed, her make-up and hair were perfect, and her Giant blue smock clean and pressed. Hilda knew each of her customers by name, knew all their families, their likes and dislikes, and could carry on a conversation while checking them out always meticulously bagging their groceries keeping dry groceries together, produce together, dairy and delly together, meat together, and frozen food together. Hilda represented the epitome of Giant Food. I found, over the years, having worked at dozens of Giants, that each store had their own Hilda.
I suppose this sums up my reflections on grocery stores from “back in the day”. What were some of yours?