When I was growing up, our local grocery store closed at 6. My father didn’t get away from work until nearly then.
So it was a matter of scheduling.
Yeah, I recall my mother going to the grocery store in the late afternoon- like 4 or 5 o’clock, and my father usually wasn’t home by that point. On occasion, she’d call him at work and ask him to pick something specific up on the way home, like say… a loaf of bread if she’d forgotten it, or if it had got moldy earlier than expected. He rarely did a whole trip, but he did lots of spot purchase type things.
I tended to do a lot of the grocery shopping pre-pandemic, mostly because I more or less enjoy it, while my wife more or less does not. So I’d stop on the way home, or go during my lunch hour.
I’m not 100% sure one of my grandfathers actually set foot in a grocery store. The other I know did, but only because he commented that he stopped on the way home to get chicken necks to go crabbing with one time. It wasn’t a thing for the born around 1915-1920 set for sure.
I got married in 1959 and I didn’t feel a bit strange about pushing the cart around with my bride. But I had been batching it for a year or so, and she was just coming off Mama’s cooking, so I had to teach her how to shop.
I doubt if my dad had ever been in a grocery in lis life.
I appreciate the replies, apparently it wasn’t taboo it was just that store hours were limited. I guess that commercial just has their own reasons for having no male cashiers or customers.
I wasn’t around in the 60s and my entire life it’s always been normal to see single men at the grocery store.
Same here, my Dad used to love to go grocery shopping. OTOH he didnt have a 9-5 job.
My Mom and Dad came up with a great idea to teach me shopping and money management. They figured out how much they spent on grocerys at the local Ralphs, 2-3 blocks from my house. They gave me that much cash + some and I did the shopping, what was left over I got to keep. Of course I had to get everything on the list. Now my Mom worked for Savon so toiletries, paper goods etc she got, and my dad got us a 1/4 steer from the butchers and we kept in a locker.
So TP and meat I didnt have to get. First few trips i was buying cookies, donuts crap like that .
They I got smart. Hunted bargains, clipped coupons, went on double coupon days, bought store brands. This has done me well over the years. Learning to shop for bargains will save you mucho dinero over a lifetime.
(The Ralphs let me take the cart home, you could in those days if you lived within a certain radius and brought it back or left it in certain places.)
Same thing in About Schmidt, 2002.
1950’s - bread and milk were delivered to the door. My mother would take the 10-minute walk to the local (small) grocery store for things like fruit, vegetables, and sometimes meat - often bringing a kid or two along. On Saturdays, my father would drive us all to the “big” supermarket (10 minutes away by car) to buy everything else. The few times I would see a $20 bill in those days was at the supermarket cash register.
Until 1953, my senior year in HS, we didn’t have a car and did all our shopping at one of three small groceries, one across the street and the other two a half block away in different directions. Also a butcher shop four doors away. My mother did some of the shopping, I did most of the rest. The stores were closed by the time my father got home from work. After we got the car, my father would drive my mother to the market once a week since she didn’t drive. Some years later she got a license and did some of it alone. But by that time we lived about a block from a supermarket. Still, there was no real reason my father didn’t shop; only the store hours.
I don’t think there was a taboo for men to go to the grocery store, but I’ve read that it was for a brief time taboo for a man to use a shopping cart. A cart resembled a baby carriage, and there was also a suggestion that a man who used a cart wasn’t strong enough to carry his groceries to the checkout counter. Didn’t last though. For obvious reasons.
My mom stayed home with us until my younger brother went into first grade. She would do all the shopping during the day on a weekday and I don’t remember many, if any, men around.
I don’t recall my dad shopping for anything when I was a kid, not even the “honey, pick up a gallon of milk on the way home” kind of thing. Then when I was a teenager my mom had two spells of ill health, once with viral pneumonia where she was contagious AF and not allowed to touch food for three weeks and once with knee surgery that had her out of commission for about six weeks. As the eldest all responsibility for feeding the family then fell on me and I recall a memorable occasion where I had to do a full shopping trip and my sisters accompanied me into the store while my dad stayed out in the car. We filled up the cart with what we assumed were the right things (the list was by no means comprehensive lol) and dad only came in to write the check–we kids even had to schlep the bags out. Dad was (and pretty much is) a traditional entitled white American male. Such stuff as tending to his own family’s food needs is completely beneath him aside from paying for it.
My father always did the grocery shopping. As the “sole breadwinner” finances were his “responsibility” (and no doubt the fact he was a chartered accountant by profession played into it)
Dad took me grocery shopping on Saturday mornings and when we got home it was my job to help bring them into the house. The grocery store he shopped at was downtown and as the years progressed I was “using” dad more for transportation because in my teens I wanted to visit the car showrooms and drool over the '68ish supersports etc on display while he grocery shopped.
My mother was still working on her PhD when I was born, and having two kids slowed her down, so she didn’t actually finish until I was about 8, and my brother was 4. My father was not the sole breadwinner, as my mother brought in a little money as a graduate assistant, but it mostly allowed us to break even on the expenses for her school-- her tuition was free because she went to the same school where my father was a professor, and eventually a full professor with tenure.
My mother did the shopping, as that was really a morning activity, because you wanted to get stuff while it was fresh. My father did probably a lot more housework than most men in the late 60s and 1970s, but my mother still did more; the fact of the matter is, though, that my mother was seriously OCD, and went around redoing stuff after my father, or my brother or I had done it. So a lot of her complaining that she never got any help had to do with her exacting standards. When I was 10, and we’d gotten back from the USSR, my mother got a full position; my parents hired someone to clean once a week, and after a few different people, found my mother’s Sharona.
Anyway, several times during my growing up, my mother was in Europe doing research. When I was old enough to do the cooking, I did, several times a week. When I was little, I spent more time with my aunt and uncle than I did with my parents, because I was there afterschool while my mother had class, before my brother was born, and I lived with them in high school, except a couple of summers.
One summer, my mother was in Prague, and I was with my father and brother; I was old enough to drive at that point, and so then, I did ALL the shopping. But there was another time my mother was away for nine months straight-- this is when I did a great deal of the cooking, so I made out lists of what we needed, and all three of us shopped together-- my father, brother and me. My father had to drive, and my brother was too young to stay home alone, but I picked out a lot of the stuff, because I knew exactly what I needed-- what kind of potato, what sized can of something, fresh vegetables and fruits to ripen by a specific day. Peanut oil, or corn oil, or olive oil. I was 12.
At that point, I was also shopping for what I needed to make lunches for my father and brother, as well as myself. I got treated so much like an adult during this time, and I loved it. It was kind of a bummer when my mother came back.
If the family owned two cars. Otherwise Mom had to wait for the family car to come home.
In the late forties, early fifties, I “walked” a half mile with my mother to do the shopping at the local very small grocery store. And enjoyed the street theater of the vegetable truck’s twice a week visit to our block.
Dan
Dan
Depends very much on where you lived. In the immediate area where I grew up , lots of households didn’t own a car at all.(and lots of women didn’t know how to drive) Mom walked and did the shopping with one of these. If you lived further out, mom may have dropped dad at the train station in the morning and picked him up in the evening so she could use the car during the day on either a daily or occasional basis. I remember when I was looking to buy one of my first cars and I had to ask my father what a “station car” was because so many of the classifieds used that term. It was a car that was suitable for going to and from the train station, but not for longer trips.
My Dad took me to the store one day in the late forties - I was about four or five - an at one point said “I forgot something, stay here and guard the cart”. So I latched on, only, to the wrong cart. So when the actual owner tried to claim it, I glared at him and wouldn’t let go. Dad returned, and hilarity ensued - and he was proud of me for standing “my” ground.
And as for older guys shunning the grocery store, my old man was born in 1916. And what did single guys do for food? I doubt if every single male earned enough to allow three diner meals a day.
Dan
When I was a kid, my dad rode the bus downtown to work, leaving the car for my mom to use.
Yeah, my Dad took the bus to work (engineer at Glenn L. Martin), and it wasn’t until 1950 that we even owned a car. Parents bought a new 1950 Ford (anyone remember how the neighbors would gather when a new car showed up?)
We lived in a new 40’s bungalow on a long block of about 60 houses that were mostly owned by young adults fueling the baby boom. Dad continued to bus to work, Mom learned to drive, at almost thirty, and as the only driving mom with auto availability was the most popular person on the block, because she was always up for taxi and ambulance service, with dozens of new little kids needing stitches and plaster casts.
Dan
My mother shopped with one of those in Manhattan. We didn’t have a car. My father took the subway to work, and when I was three, my older cousin walked me to school. I, and my cousins on both sides went to the same Jewish day school. My mother just walked down the street, stopping at all the different shops: the butcher, the greengrocer (who also sold eggs, and a few other things, like boxed cereals), the stationer, the 5 & dime, the bakery (which was where you went for finished baked goods, but also for bags of flour, packs of yeast, sugar, and a few other things), and the bodega, which was the best place for things like canned goods, snack foods, and cheese. Milk was still delivered. My mother would buy usually two days of stuff at once, so she had to shop every other day. On Friday, she shopped for Shabbes as well as Sunday, so she came home with lots of stuff. It barely all fit in the fridge.
My experience was a lot like Hari’s. My mother did the shopping in the 1950s because a corner grocery and a small supermarket were within walking distance. I often accompanied her and made the run to the corner store as I grew older. She did all the cooking as well and planned the meals, so it made sense not to give my father more chores to do. He had a physically hard job and adding grocery shopping didn’t make sense.
That changed somewhat in the 1960s. A big suburban supermarket opened up that required driving. My mother didn’t drive. So the three of us went more or less weekly on a Saturday or Sunday. The store had much better meat and produce departments so there was some discussion of what to get now that we had more choices, but that was the extent of my father’s contribution.
OTOH, my now wife and I shopped together and shared cooking chores from the day we moved in together 47 years ago and never have done a major shopping trip by ourselves except when one was too sick to go.