Were there ‘butcher shops’ before the advent of electricity, and, if so, how was meat stored so that it was fresh for the customers?
On the hoof. A butcher back in the old days wouldn’t have been like one today. There wouldn’t have been a selection of chops or roasts to choose from. The butcher would probably kill one animal every day or two.
I should also say that salted meat would keep almost forever and the value of salt in the old days is pretty well established. I don’t know if a butcher would have salted meats though, that may have been left to the customer.
There’d be a lot of sausage, as well. Smoke- and salt- cured stuff lasts well without being kept cold.
But as for whole cuts, as **adam ** said, it would be more a case of someone bringing a critter to the butcher to be broken down into pieces and eaten soon, probably by quite a few people. About the only modern counterpart to this is a pig pickin’ - a Southern specialty where a pig is slaughtered, split and slow-cooked. You then have the whole village (or large family) over for dinner.
Similar traditions existed in rural England (and probably everywhere else, out of sheer practicality); many families would buy a piglet, fatten it through the year with table scraps (and anything else on which they could lay their hands), then take it to the butcher to be slaughtered; the butcher would make hams, sausages, bacon, brawn, lard, scratchings etc, as well as keeping some of the cuts fresh for immediate use. Some of the products would go back to the family who owned the pig, some would be retained by the butcher in payment for his services (which he could keep for personal use or sell), some would be passed on as payment in kind of the family’s minor debts, sometimes some would be set aside for the needy. The following week, the same sort of thing would happen with a different family’s animal.
Often the pig would be slaugered at Christmas time.