Apparently you could redeem them as late as 2020, says Wikipedia, though they’d quit passing them out quite a while before then.
I used to apologize to the librarians for the fuss caused by using Interlibrary Loan. Their response was something like - ‘having this to do is why I have this job, so please keep using it’…
The Ann&Hope store here in Cumberland used to have a conveyor to take carriages from the bottom floor below street level where you checked out up to the parking lot.
Mainlanders may not recognize the Ann&Hope name. It was an early big box store started in the 1950s with outlets in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The main stores have all shut down.
There’s a little independent grocery store in Wisconsin Dells, WI, which has baggers who will transport your bags to your car after you check out. As of last November (the last time I was up there), they still did this, and still used carts like the ones in your link.
Yep. I also remember them from that era at the A&P and the Winn-Dixie.
When I was in training for a new supermarket chain, many of us were trained at nearby existing supermarkets. My training store was in a pretty large plaza so had a vast area to bring and leave carts, so I spent a lot of time in the cart rodeo roundin’ 'em up. As the new place was quite a bit smaller lot-wise my first day was bagging. I put a lady’s pie into a bag vertically. Lesson learned: pies go horizontal. She got a new pie.
Growing up the local Modell’s supermarket meat section was practically featured behind glass. There’s that saying “I don’t want to see how the sausage is made?” In Modell’s it was happening right there before your eyes. I was fascinated.
Same store also had the conveyor belts - and it was a good couple hundred yard ride underground before your stuff would pop-up in bins and the bags placed in your trunk.
That used to be pretty common. I think the whole idea was exactly that yes people wanted to see how the sausage was made – a store that was doing it in secret could be putting anything in it, after all. Also to see that the package labelled ground sirloin or ground round wasn’t ground chuck mixed with bits from the floor. Even people who didn’t particularly want to look did want to know that the store wasn’t trying to hide anything.