Shopping in a (relatively speaking) bygone era

In my last post - Unidentified item in the bagging area - I touched upon how shopping has changed from being a personalized, pleasurable service to the misery it is today before it turned into a rant against Tesco. Incidentally, soda water is another casualty, as I noticed today. I used to be able to get Tesco branded soda water at 40p a bottle. Now there's only Schweppes at £1 a bottle! Just a bit of difference there then.  It's just as well I'm not a gin drinker or I'd be even more miserable than I already am.

So there was nothing for it; I had to grit my teeth and gird my loins and venture into the personification of  Hades that is Asda. Actually at 11am on a Tuesday morning, if not what we'd call heavenly, it's at least just about bearable.

Anyway, as ever, I digress. What I wanted to talk about was shopping and how much it has changed since I was a child back in the early sixties.

On Bakestone Moor, where I lived there was a large Co-operative grocery store with a separate butchers. Or Corp as it was usually referred to. As in "I'm just going t'corp for some milk tokens". We tend not to use  the definite article in Derbyshire as you can see.  It was many years later that I discovered it was actually 'Co-operative'. A bit like Dr Arra - but that's another story.

Anyway; This 'Corp' had no self-service. Oh no.  There was a long counter with most of the stock on shelves ranging from floor to ceiling. I remember a long pole with a hook on it being used to access boxes of cornflakes from the top shelves. Frequently by a very thin woman with peroxide hair in some sort of beehive hairdo.

Cheese and ham and bacon and so on were not platicised and plumped out with water and ready sliced in vacuum packs. They were in blocks and were cut to one's requirements and wrapped in greasproof paper. As in did was bread! (Cling film - nasty stuff - hadn't been invented then) The wrappings from which were used to grease the slide in the play park top make it slidier! :-) But apart from the novel form of these products and the very useful wrappings they came in, the most exciting thing about them was that they  actually tasted of something! Like cheese; or ham; or bacon...

Dried fruit for cake making was in large tubs and weighed out as required. You get the idea. The amount you spent was totted up and recorded in your 'divvy' book. At the end of each year, Co-operative members, received their dividend.

I have no recollection of there being any other way to get milk than to have it delivered from the Co-op milkman. We bought milk tokens from the Co-op. They came in different colours to represent what type of milk you wanted. I think there was a choice of two. Silver top and gold top. Silver top being the regular kind with the cream on top and gold top being full cream. If there were others I don't recall them. So then every night one put out the empty milk bottles and the tokens for how many pints you wanted. Simples!

So that was on Bakestone Moor. The moor is an adjunct of the village Whitwell which is down the hill. Whitwell had a Co-op drapers which was all 'Are you being served' in that it was glass counters and everything in those little drawers under the counter and behind it.

In Worksop, the nearest town, there was a large Co-op department store. I remember the lifts with a lift operator and the metal gate things that pulled across first. I have too a vivid memory of the best Father Christmas (as he was in those days. None of this Santa stuff.) grotto ever.

So yeah, all a bit different from self-service checkouts and being told off by a computerized check-out bitch.