Sunday, January 9, 2005 Aging in the aisles By…

Sunday, January 9, 2005

                    Aging in the aisles
By Julie Kirkwood
Staff Writer

In the 1930s a "self-serve" trend was sweeping the nation's grocery
stores.

It wasn't a check-out line where shoppers could scan and bag their
own groceries -- it was the shopping cart.

Customers for the first time could walk the aisles of the store with
a carriage and grab their own groceries. Before that, they had to
ask a store clerk to fetch grocery items from behind a counter.

Supermarkets have come a long way since 1930. This year the
supermarket industry celebrates the 75th anniversary of the first
supermarket, King Kullen, on Long Island.

As supermarkets have changed since 1930, so have our lifestyles.

In the 1930s women canned tomatoes to make them last through
the winter. Today tomatoes are available fresh every day of the
year, not to mention raspberries, strawberries and exotic tropical
fruit.

Meats, vegetables and whole dinners are sold preassembled, pre-
marinated and ready to pop in the oven.

While typical supermarkets today carry more than 30,000 products,
food costs have dropped relative to family income, claiming only 6
percent of disposable family income, down from 21 percent in
1930, according to the Food Marketing Institute.

Supermarkets are an interesting part of American history that is
often overlooked, said David Gwynn, founder of a supermarket
history appreciation site www.groceteria.com.

"It's such a universal, everyday thing in most people's lives," Gwynn
said. "Historical preservationists seem more concerned with grand
buildings such as opera houses or mansions rather than with the
sorts of places that normal people actually spend time in.

"Comparatively few people live in 20-room castles on a hill, but
almost everyone goes to the grocery store."

Shopping every day

The supermarket concept quickly swept a nation desperate for
bargains during the Great Depression. Early supermarkets boasted
more than 1,000 items, compared to a typical inventory of 700 in
neighborhood stores.

The gimmick was they sold canned goods, baking supplies,
vegetables, fruits, meat and bread all under one roof.

In Lawrence, the supermarket revolution of the 1930s began with
three stores on Essex Street: Brockelman's Market, Ganem's Market
and Mohegan.

"These markets, they had everything," said Susan Ricci, who was a
child in Lawrence in the 1930s.

Ganem's and Brockelman's specialized in meat and Mohegan's had
baked goods, but they also carried vegetables and a variety of
other products.

Supermarket gimmicks appear to be as old as supermarkets
themselves.

Phyllis Hutton, 78, of Methuen recalled how Brockelman's
positioned its doughnut bakery in a window so people could stop
on the street and watch.

"Right at the corner," she said, "there were doughnuts they were
making constantly."

Though these early supermarkets made shopping more convenient,
buying food in the 1930s was still a time-consuming activity.

Many families continued to shop at the small ethnic markets in
their neighborhoods during the Depression because the
shopkeepers let them buy on credit.

Even those who shopped at the supermarkets also shopped at
specialty stores.

Mothers dragged their children to bakeries, to butcher shops and
to Kennedy's stores, which sold butter, cheese, eggs and coffee in
bulk.

"They would go shopping every day because they'd get everything
fresh," said Leno Lucas, 80, of Methuen.

The first rudimentary home refrigerator wasn't created until 1927
and wouldn't be widely adopted as a home appliance until after
World War II. Most families in the 1930s kept their food in ice
boxes.

"There was no such thing as 'Put it in the freezer and keep it for six
months,'" Lucas said.

Driving for bargains

As the nation moved out of the Depression, supermarkets grew
more popular and started putting the strain on smaller
neighborhood markets.

John Hardacre, 79, of Methuen remembers when his family stopped
shopping at their local store.

"I can remember my mother saying, 'OK go over to Frankie's, the
corner store. Give him a buck on the bill,'" Hardacre said. "'Now go
(to a supermarket) downtown and buy the food that he's selling,'
because it was like a penny cheaper."

It was not just low prices that drew shoppers to supermarkets.

When soldiers came home at the end of World War II in 1945, they
got married, found jobs and moved out of the tenements in
downtown Lawrence, said history buff Ned Leone, 71, of Methuen.
As bigger supermarkets opened and people bought cars, they
traveled even farther for groceries.

National supermarket chains, such as A&P and First National,
opened stores in the Lawrence area.

By the 1950s, people were still driving to Lawrence to shop at the
smaller supermarkets and specialty stores, but it took effort.

There were so many cars on the road by then, it was almost
impossible to find a parking space, Leone said.

"Everybody started getting more affluent, you know," said 83-year-
old Theresa Skorupka of Lawrence. "Then women started to work
and we had two pays coming in. And then we all had cars and we'd
go further and further out. We'd go to New Hampshire to save tax."

Customer appreciation

By the mid-1960s a new craze had caught on with shoppers: S&H
Green Stamps.

Shoppers earned the stamps by shopping at certain supermarkets
and gas stations. Families collected them faithfully in books and
redeemed them for kitchen appliances, toys and other household
items.

"I got a beautiful bundt pan I still use today," said Christine
Plonowski, 78, of Lawrence. "We got clippers for the bushes. We
still use them."

Margaret Wawszkiewicz, 75, of Lawrence saved up for a special
gift.

"I bought my daughter a rocking horse for Christmas," she said.

What Bonnie Sisson remembers as a child in the 1960s is dropping
off a grocery list at Merrill's Market in Methuen Square on her way
to school. The store filled the order and delivered the groceries to
her family's home.

On the way home from school she could stop in at the store for a
Coke in a glass bottle.

Lynne Moss, 46, used to save her money as a little girl for the toy
aisle at the A&P near her home in Methuen. She liked the toy
necklaces and earrings in the plastic packages.

"My girlfriend and I would ride down on our bikes with our little
money," she said. "We thought we were rich."

The modern era

Technology began to revolutionize supermarkets in the 1970s.

On June 26, 1974, a company called PSC scanned the first UPC bar
code on a supermarket product -- a 10-pack of Wrigley's chewing
gum -- at a grocery store in Ohio, according to the company.

Supermarkets and retailers like Wal-Mart are now looking ahead to
the next technological advance, radio frequency identification tags
that will tell them at a distance and through packaging which
products need to be restocked.
The large supermarket chains that have stores in the Merrimack
Valley are upgrading their technology with each store redesign. The
newest Shaw's and Stop & Shop markets now offer self-checkout
aisles and computerized deli orders.

Stop & Shop is offering a "shopping buddy" tablet computer to
shoppers in a few of its South Shore stores.

The computer displays a running total cost of everything in your
cart, flags sale items based on your shopping habits, and lets you
order deli meat from anywhere in the store.

As supermarkets introduce new innovations and gimmicks,
traditions silently slip away.

Most newly designed supermarkets no longer have coin-operated
horse rides outside the front entrance, and many have done away
with the capsule-toy vending machines.

Instead, children can now take a ride in plastic race cars attached
to the front of shopping carts at some stores.

While Skorupka and her friends at the Lawrence Senior Center are
nostalgic for the stores of their youth, she wouldn't trade them for
supermarkets today.

"This way you're done in an hour," said Skorupka, who shops at
Market Basket. "You go and you pick up your stuff and you go
home. You have one store, that's it."

Wawszkiewicz disagreed. She preferred shopping the old way.

"It was nice that you met people, people from different stores," she
said. "There was camaraderie. It made it nice. ... You can't get that
in the big markets."

                                     Next Story: Staying underground




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