Mark bought himself some unscented Speed Stick deodorant at the CVS Pharmacy this evening. I’m sure you are relieved.
Carole responded to my post about the grocery stores and the advent of new cheaper stores that just stock milk and eggs and the necessities of a grocery. It has just made me reminisce about all the grocery stores I grew up in.
In Amarillo there was Safeway and Furr’s. The Furr’s was at 34th and Bell is an auto parts store now and I’ve been in it so see if it feels at all like the old store. It doesn’t. That was where Mother and I were when we heard that President Kennedy had been killed. I have no memory of that moment, but Mother says a woman came rushing into the store, panicking, and telling people that the President had been shot. The manager said he would find out and he came back in a moment and let people know it was true. I do remember many of the events in the days after, but I don’t remember that moment.
The Safeway was at the corner of 34th and Western. It was closer to the house, but I think we liked the Furr’s better.
When we moved to the country, we still shopped a lot in Amarillo stores, but we would have to plan our grocery trips to rush straight home and get things into the freezer or refrigerator since it was a 20 or 30 minute drive. That would be the last stop. We also began to shop in Canyon at what is really a bygone thing, the hometown grocery store. The nicest one was Cooper’s. It was very small compared to today’s grocery stores, but had everything you needed. Mr. Blewett, the father of my classmate Tammy, worked there and it was always nice to see someone I knew from church working in a business.
Occasionally we would stop, just for milk or something small, at Crow’s or Jack’s groceries in Canyon. They were truly more like the convenience stores of today. No, they were too small to compare, really. I suppose some people may have been able to do all of their shopping there, but they were tiny stores and only had maybe three aisles. They were old-fashioned stores at the time, with wooden floors in Crow’s and a logo that looked like the crow in Hekyl and Jekyl.
In my day (as I find myself saying more and more), the clerks would take your items out of your basket for you and punch the prices into the big cash registers and only THEN would they go down the never-ending conveyor belt to the sacker. I loved the cash registers and loved when a clerk could punch four numbers with one quick punch, not even looking, then smack down on the big square beige button with the heel of her hand to make the numbers “register.” Mom would write out her check while this was going on, waiting for the final amount. Mom always wrote her check for more so she could get some cash back and no one ever needed to see a driver’s license. At Cooper’s, they even had blank checks from the First National Bank so you didn’t even have to have your checkbook with you when you came to the store. But we banked in Amarillo so I never got to see those blank checks in action.
After the checking was done, while the young man that was sacking was still putting everything into big brown paper sacks (with no other option) and putting them on the tall upright cart, the checker would dial, like a telephone, on her big trading stamps device and spool off dozens of big “10″ point trading stamps. In Amarillo, we got green stamps most of the time. S&H Green Stamps. There was also Gunn Brothers. In Canyon they were gold and I can’t remember what they were called. There was a time that it was fun to paste in the stamps into the books and see how many you could fill up. I delighted in tearing the stamps, the 1 point stamps, into individual stamps and pasting them one at a time. That soon got old and I was glad they came in 10s and you could paste down a strip at a time. But I still loved the feel of a thick, solid, book all pasted with individual stamps.
When scanners came along, I really missed the big registers and the punch, ching, punch, ching, routine. I always wanted to be a checker, but the scanners killed that enthusiasm. I hated it when prices were taken off of items, too. I LIKED having that purple 34 cents stamped on my soup can. Then you could also notice at home when the prices had changed. Hey! Tuna was 73 cents last week and now it is up to 80! And you could also fish around among the cans and find the ones that still had last week’s price and save a few pennies. On the other hand, with the scanning there are less mistakes and the items and their prices are all spelled out for you on the tape. We used to go home and say, “Now what could I have bought that cost $5 when I didn’t buy any meat?” and we’d have to think and study on it until we realized Mom let us buy a record album or something.
And yes, that was a huge difference back in the day. With those small stores, you’d think that they wouldn’t carry something like records, but they certainly did. You don’t see a selection of CDs in groceries anymore (okay, unless it is the megamart thing), but back then that’s where we got a lot of our albums. I vividly remember the record rack at the Furr’s in Amarillo and Mackie and I asking Mom if we could have “Meet the Beatles!” She let us have it and my life was changed! Later, it was 1975 and I read an article about the “Red Headed Stranger” album in Texas Monthly while I was at the dentist. I had to go to the grocery afterward and saw it there and bought it and took it home. Again, my life was never the same. I remember buying “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” at Cooper’s and quickly getting it purchased and out of Mom’s sight so she wouldn’t notice the song titles that might not meet her approval (now I can’t even remember what song title I was worried about… The Bitch is Back was on Caribou and I certainly kept THAT one out of Mom’s hands).
Just to clarify, I don’t remember going to grocery stores with a wooden basket over my arm or having the meat man offer me a steak. That were modern, just less modern than today. Less crowded than today. Less busy than today. And a lot cheaper than today.