I’ve spent far too much time in the grocery store in the past few weeks, since I now work in two departments, deli and seafood. Last night, wearing my little white seafood-department jacket and little white seafood-department hat, wrapping up custom-cut fillets in white waxed butcher’s paper, I got to thinking that this is what the conception of grocery shopping in the '50s is. Friendly butchers and bakers and fishmongers and so on. I’m only 19 years old so I wasn’t there, of course.
So I got to wondering… ::deep breath::
What was it like to go grocery shopping in the '40s and '50s? Would one have been more likely to do the shopping in one grocery store, or in the traditional market method of getting meat from the butcher, going down the street to the baker for bread, etc? A grocery store would probably have been a little Mom & Pop place instead of today’s supermarkets, but what’s the difference? When did modern supermarkets take over? What would the selection of groceries have been like? How were things packaged? How were the stores set up? How were items displayed? During the war, how did the rationing system work?
I think the “modern supermarket” dates back to the 1920s, but didn’t become the shopping norm until after WWII.
Grocery shopping in the 40s and 50s would have been similar to the way it is in Brooklyn today (although we DO have the option of one-stop shopping at Key Food).
On the walk home from the subway station, you’d stop at the butcher for meat, the fishmonger for fish (especially on Fridays, if you’re Catholic!), the bakery for bread (unless you bake your own), the greengrocer for fruits and veggies, and the small grocer for anything you want in cans or packages.
The selection at the butcher would probably be better back then than it is today…more different cuts and organ meats would be available, for one thing (people knew how to cook 'em back then), and you’d get bones for free.
There’d be fewer options at the fish market and the greengrocer, because people settled for simpler stuff back then…they ate cod instead of mahi mahi, and carrots instead of bok choy. And the baker would probably sell more white bread than anything else.
One important fact is the changing tides of immigration… spaghetti and macaroni would have been considered exotica back in the 1920s, because most of the Italians in the country were fresh off the boat. Now you can choose between nearly as many types of pasta as you could if you lived in Tuscany. Today I can buy goat meat whenever I want to, because of all the West Indians in New York.
I vividly remember as a kid in the late 50s going to supermarkets from the A&P and Star chains. This was in a residential neighborhood in Rochester, NY, not in a suburb. Both were considerably smaller than most of today’s suburban supermarkets, of course, more the size of a modern pharmacy. But they had a number of aisles full of goods, meat departments, dairy departments, and the like just like today’s supermarkets. There were probably fewer choices and fewer items of each individual choice on the shelves, though. Packaging was similar to today. I don’t remember much in the way of frozen foods, though.
We also had a smaller grocery store, meat market, dairy, bakery and other stores that were closer to my house than either supermarket. We did go to these as well, but something must have caused my mother to walk a longer distance (on bad legs) to go to the supermarkets on a regular basis and I can only conclude that the selection or pricing or both were better.
The 50s (yes, I was there) were a period of transition from the corner grocery store (more or less like today’s convenience store or bodega) to the modern supermarket. The supermarkets of the 50s were in general smaller, but did have fresh meat, dairy, eggs and produce, bakery goods (either prepacked or from their own bakery) and several aisles of packaged foods.
What they didn’t have is the related services you see in today’s supermarket. The 50s supermarket might cash your check, sell stamps and take your utility payment, but that was about it. Florists, one hour photo stores, sushi bars, bank branches, etc. were unheard of (although a few places did have “coffee shops”)