Grocery Shopping, Then and Now: Post-WW2, My Grandmother's Day

I was thinking about how much grocery shopping has changed since my grandmother's day, piecing together tidbits of information from the recesses of my memory and wanted to write it all out. These are my family's experiences and may not be what your family has experienced, with relation to grocery shopping over the last 75 years.

Because my recollections for my grandmother's early years of grocery shopping were largely drawn from my mother's stories and my vague memories from early childhood, I only have bits and pieces for the years between when my grandparents married in the late 1920s until the end of WW2, when my mother was grammar school-age. I started this writing journey with the post-war years, when my grandparents moved back to their home state after moving house 6 or 7 times between the years of 1942 and 1948. (My grandfather worked for a government contractor during the war and was relocated frequently.)

My Grandmother's experience, as told to me by herself, my mother, and from my observations when visiting plus the two years that I lived with her

My maternal grandparents bought a house "in the country" at the end of WW2. "In the country" at that time and place didn't mean living in farm country, but more an area removed from the city but without the amenities of the suburbs, such as street lighting, sidewalks, and convenient shopping. Even so, there was a grammar school within walking distance for my mother. 

My grandparents had one car, which my grandfather drove to and from work in the city each weekday. All stores and markets were closed on Sundays. The nearest market was too far to walk to and carry very much back. Walking to and from the store would also use up valuable time my grandmother needed for keeping the home and caring for children. So, she did what many other housewives in that area did at the time, she ordered her groceries to be delivered. 

How grocery delivery worked back then

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Twice a week my grandmother would phone in an order for next-day delivery. (By 1950, 61% of American homes had a telephone, according to statista.com.) The store clerk would shop her list for her, box it all up, and the delivery man would bring the grocery box to her house the following morning. Roles for the market employees often overlapped. The store owner might pack it all up and deliver it. Or, the delivery driver might also work as clerk and a stock boy, ringing up sales, restocking shelves, unloading new items, etc. The owner might also function as the butcher, helping customers at the meat counter. The market owner's wife likely helped with all of the lighter work, such as cashiering, bookkeeping, packing boxes, and dusting shelves and tops of canned and boxed products. The market where my grandmother bought her groceries was a small one. 

Small markets had small staffs, often just the owners and a couple of additional employees. As such, my grandmother had the opportunity to get to know the owners and employees well. The owner might make recommendations or offer a special item to her. He would cut meat to order, especially useful when my grandfather's boss and his wife would be coming for dinner. When the store introduced a new product, the owner sometimes would include a sample (meaning full-size product) with her order. These samples would be free of charge for her to try, if the owner felt it might be something my grandmother might like. Whoever delivered her groceries, they would come into her kitchen and put her perishable items away in the refrigerator for her. Everyone knew her by name and she knew them by name, as well -- no employee-name tags needed.

How she paid

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My grandmother's groceries would be charged to her store account. At the end of the month, my grandfather would go into the market and pay off the account. By the 1961, they each had their own car. (The second car came from my grandmother's father's estate after he passed away.) With this addition, my grandmother began marketing in person. Their financial arrangement must have changed at this time, as well, as she paid for her groceries when she shopped and no longer carried a balance on an account. Just to note, she always (even in later years) paid cash at the grocery store, never brought a checkbook when that was an option.

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Despite my grandmother's small grocery market experience, many housewives were enjoying a new way to shop. The 1950s ushered in the widespread appearance of suburban supermarkets, with larger stores boasting numerous aisles, shopping carts replacing hand-carried baskets, mostly self-service meat departments, and an abundance of new brands and products from which to choose. All of this meant parking lot sizes increased, too. 

Supermarkets changed the way many suburban Americans shopped. The shopping carts encouraged customers to buy more at a time, so housewives would need to shop less often. Menu planning beyond 3 or 4 days would be necessary to ensure a household would have all they needed for a 7-day week. These early supermarkets experimented with extending operating hours, staying open into the evening perhaps one day per week. Yet most held to the closed-on-Sundays tradition.

Keeping perishables

similar to what I remember from my grandmother's kitchen in the 1960s and early 70s

My grandmother never had a stand-alone freezer. The only freezer she had was a small compartment in the fridge. She did just a small amount of canning to preserve food, relying instead on commercially-canned and boxed products for pantry staples. While she and my grandfather lived "in the country" for many years, they were more flower gardeners than vegetable gardeners. Yet, they did have some fruit trees.

Her later years

Even after my grandmother moved to a smaller house in a suburban neighborhood in 1970, she still preferred to shop in a particular grocery store that was smaller and gave her more personal attention. She was less concerned about finding the best deal than she was about buying higher quality. She had preferred brands from which she would not stray. She also chose to shop a couple of times per week in order to serve the freshest of produce and meat products. I don't think she ever stocked her freezer with meat. The refrigerator section had a meat bin/drawer, where she would keep 2 or 3 days worth of fresh meat. 

In her later years, my step-grandfather and she would shop together. He would do the driving, push the cart, and keep up his end of the conversation, and she would select items, ask him questions about meals and preferences, and interact with the butcher in the meat department and the cashier at the check-out. Grocery shopping had become a "date" of sorts for this sweet, elderly couple. 

Return to some grocery delivery

My grandmother did begin to have milk delivery at some point in these later years. After my step-grandfather passed, the milk delivery order grew, and she shopped in-person less. The dairy service offered milk, cream, cheese, butter, bread, jello salads, eggs, and other foods. My grandmother would shop in a store to buy canned and boxed foods plus some produce and meat every week to 10 days and supplement meals heavily with what would be delivered by the milk man. If there had been full-service grocery delivery at this point in my grandmother's life, I know she would have chosen that option to procure her food and household needs.

My grandmother was born just after the turn of the 20th century and lived until the early 1990s. For the majority of my grandmother's grocery shopping years, natural food stores were considered "fringe," Costco warehouse stores weren't everywhere, and there was certainly no internet shopping available. Yet, she witnessed many changes in grocery shopping, from in-city specialty markets (butchers, bakeries, and produce shops from her childhood years), to small grocery markets with home-delivery, to the introduction of large supermarkets. She may have thought she was living in "modern times." Little did she know what would be right around the corner, in regards to shopping for food and household items.

Stay tuned for my next set of recollections from my mother's grocery shopping years.