Grocery

“ When Americans sit down to a meal each day, we sometimes take for granted the quality and variety of the food we eat. Our grocery stores, supermarkets, and restaurants offer us an enormous volume and selection of fruits, vegetables, meats, dairy products, and other food items, but we too often forget the hardworking men and women whose skill and effort put that food on our tables. ”

“ Personal attention in buying food.—It is absolutely necessary to visit the market and the grocery where food is purchased. The purchaser would not fail to visit a shop before deciding to patronize it regularly, but frequent calls are necessary if buying is to be economical. Select the grocery, market, and bakery with a view to their cleanliness. Notice if the doors and windows are screened, and if proper effort is made to catch flies that may have entered. Refuse to buy food that is exposed upon the sidewalk, and if it is within doors, see that it is protected from dust and flies. ”

“ Take one of those elevators up," Jennie would have ridden up to the fourth floor, and stupidly gazed at pink silk and val lace negligees in glass cases.
Tell me, have you ever visited the grocery department of a great store on the wrong side of State Street? It's a mouth-watering experience. A department store grocery is a glorified mixture of delicatessen shop, meat market, and vaudeville. ”

“ All who grew or made [125] more things than they could use brought them to the grocer to be sold. So the grocer helped them and they helped him, and the people went to the store for their supplies.
“You must remember, children,” went on Mr. Duwell, “the old-fashioned country store was very different from Parker’s grocery around the corner. Besides groceries, it sold harness, horse blankets, hardware, shoes, and everything people needed.”
II. The Modern Grocer
“Suppose Wallace were a grocer, Ruth, how would you like his store to be kept?” asked her mother. ”

“ It takes every good thing in a grocery, from ginger to preserved cherries, to go in it, and it is best hot. Uncle Pompey said for me to wait until the second pan came out of the stove to call you, because it is always best. ”

“ I was frankly told by the leading grocery store that they did not expect to deliver to people who had their own motors, and when I occasionally insist on a few necessities being sent up to my house, they arrive after dark conveyed by an ancient horse, as the grocery manager is conservative. ”

“ One day the person’s spouse calls them on their way home from work and says: Stop at the store. We need bread, milk, and eggs. The person goes to the grocery store and finds the bread, puts it in the cart, finds the milk and eggs, puts them in the cart, and goes to the checkout counter. ”

“ The grocery men there say that their customers taste so much before they can make up their minds to buy anything, that what with gratuitous slices of cheese and specimen mouthfuls of sugar and sample spoonfuls of molasses, the shop-keeper's profits are most dolefully diminished. ”

“ The cashier checks out those things and then the cashier says: Wait a second. You can’t just buy these things. You cannot just buy bread, milk, and eggs. You say: Why on Earth can I not buy just these three items? This is all I need. This is a different kind of grocery store. This is a grocery store patterned after the U.S. Congress. In order to buy bread, milk, and eggs, we are also going to require you to buy a bucket of nails, a half ton of iron ore, and you can use our wheelbarrow to take it out to your car, a book about cowboy poetry, and a Barry Manilow album. ”

“ Holiday-makers waiting for the shower to blow over should certainly try it.
Coloured grocery sugars, the Food Controller announces, are to be freed from control on September 6th. A coloured grocery is one in which the grocer is not as black as he is painted. ”

“ A good stand is not likely to be idle long. The fall, I was told, was a bad season for a retail grocery in New York. Many small groceries in New York are owned by men, whose wives attend the stores while they are at work. I saw a nice little grocer, whose husband is a tailor, and who works at his trade in a room back of the grocery. This seemed to be reversing the general order of things. The husbands of some grocer women keep stalls in the markets, and furnish the groceries of their wives with vegetables. I called in a neat grocery store and bought some apples. ”

“ The Grocery Supply Company is one of them. I buy barrels of sugar, barrels of flour, big boxes of prunes, and so on, from this company. Then I sell a few pounds of sugar, flour or prunes [145] at a time and make a little money each time I sell. You see I don't pay as much for the flour and sugar as I sell it for. The difference in price comes to me, and is what I live on, and sometimes it's little enough. ”

“ Good morning, sir.”
The grocer softly whispered, “There Won’t Anybody Play with Me,” and whittled a little lead out of one of his weights, in an absentminded way.
Answers to Inquiries
Dear Editor: I want to ask a question in arithmetic. I am a school boy and am anxious to know the solution. If my pa, who keeps a grocery on Milam Street, sells four cans of tomatoes for twenty-five cents, and twenty-two pounds of sugar, and one can of extra evaporated apples and three cans of superior California plums, for only—
There! ”

“ Silly that a grocery should depress one--nothing in it but trifling domestic doings--women buying beans--riding children in those grocery co-carts--higgling about an eighth of a pound more or less of squash--what did they get out of it? Misa Willerton wondered. Where was there any chance for self-expression, for creation, for art? ”

“ Usually Toodles was sent foraging to the delicatessen shops for fresh rolls, cold meats and sandwiches, eggs, fruit, tomatoes, and bakery dainties, and the hotel filled our thermos-bottles with hot coffee. We carried salt and11 pepper, mustard, sweet and sour pickles, or a relish, orange marmalade, or a fruit jam, in the hamper, and beyond that we took no staple supplies on the whole trip. We met so many people who carried with them a whole grocery-store, even to sacks of flour, that you would imagine there was not a place to get food from the Atlantic to the Pacific. ”

“ All goods for ladies’ wear and men’s furnishing are sold at correspondingly high prices.
Table supplies are very high also. Most of the grocery sundries are imported and bring good prices. Even the produce of the country is dear. ”

“ They can easily understand that the groceryman must understand his business, know how and what to buy as well as how to keep his stock in good order and sell it in a businesslike way. They will be interested in learning what each of the workers does for the community and what we as members of the community do for each in return for his service. ”

“ As a grocer, sir—g-r-o-c-e-r—grocer, a man who stands behind a counter in a white apron and his shirt-sleeves; who sells tea and sugar and candied peel and such-like things to customers—old ladies, little girls; who rises at six in the morning, takes down the shutters, sweeps out the shop, cleans the windows; who has half an hour for his dinner of corned beef and bread; who puts up the shutters at ten o'clock at night, tidies up the shop, has his supper, and goes to bed, feeling his day has not been wasted. ”

“ There she turned into a shop, which I knew was a grocer's when I saw some soap boxes on the pavement, and a swinging sign with a big T and a teapot on it, so that the lettered might read and the unlettered might see what was sold within. A grocer's shop is like a salmon basket, having only one way out. Not like a public-house, whose ways in and out are many and crooked. ”

“ THE MODERN GROCER. Nor has the enterprising retail grocer of to-day failed to catch the spirit of this progress and keep even step with it. He has become the Popular Food Provider, and his store represents about everything which is palatable in either hemisphere or any zone. As the world has grown enlightened and refined, his stock has become more and more varied and better adapted to the wants of mankind, until it embraces every delicacy of the land, sea or air. ”

“ Buy only small quantities of perishable things [Pg 16] such as green vegetables, fruit, fish, eggs, cream, and fresh butter; buy dry groceries and preserved stores in quantities large enough to entitle you to wholesale prices; and pay cash in order to avail yourself of the lowest market price. Make your purchases as early in the day as possible in order to secure a choice of fresh articles; and trade with respectable dealers who give full weight and honest measure. ”

“ They are driven in from the country in flocks, so that customers may make selections as they pass through the streets. Everything else is peddled, not only food in the form of fruits, meats, cakes, bread, vegetables, fish, butter and cheese, but all sorts of dry goods and notions, shoes, stockings and even hats, tinware, hardware, stationery; sometimes on a tray suspended from the neck of a man, sometimes on a cart, but oftener upon the back of a donkey. ”

“ When I hear of an addition to the long list, I fly at once to the grocer to obtain one of the crisp packages, and [81] hurry home to deposit it with the cook for early experiment. The adventurous sense is roused not only by the seductive advertisement but by the neatness of the container, the ears of corn or the wheat sheaf so vividly depicted on the wrapper, or the contagious smile of a radiant child brandishing a spoon and demanding more.
Only a slouchy and unimaginative housewife will repeat monotonously a breakfast schedule. ”

“ As I was leaving the shop I thought how fond mother was of rusks when she was ill. I turned back and got some. I was now quite laden with parcels, and as I knew I must purchase several more, and could not possibly carry them all in my hands, the next thing was to secure a basket. I was not long in discovering a sort of bazaar, where miscellaneous articles of every description were to be had. I chose a serviceable basket, paid for it, popped my groceries in, and went out. I soon added to the store a chicken, two pounds of beef for beef-tea, a loaf of bread, and some fresh butter. ”

“ Long live grocers! they sell all day, count their gains in the evening, take their pleasure from time to time at some frightful melodrama—and behold them happy! Yes, but they pass their time between cheese and soap. Long live rather men of letters! ”

“ Of the vast variety of such commodities as loaves of bread and knives for cutting them and plates and tables and tablecloths by means of which they are served for ultimate consumption, very few if any at all of that variety of commodities—whether finished, as a loaf of bread on the consumer’s table, or unfinished, as the growing grain or the flour of which the loaf is composed, or the fuel that bakes it, or the bricks or the metal of the baker’s oven, or the finished oven itself—give distinctive expression to all the human services they embody. ”

“ We should demand the good, but most of us cannot afford the “fancy.”
Ready-cooked foods.—More and more cooked food, canned or otherwise, is taking its place in the market. When canned goods were first manufactured on a large scale they comprised fruits, vegetables, meats, and fish, but we are now accustomed to a miscellaneous variety, including soups, baked beans, puddings, and pudding sauces, spaghetti, hashed meat, and shellfish. Bakery products have a larger sale than ever, and are found in small towns, and even in country districts carried there by bakers’ wagons. ”

“ The food product ready, it is put to one of two uses—fed to the live stock from which we obtain our milk, butter, cheese, meat and meat products, or it is sent to factories where by means of much more labor and care it is further prepared for our table. By canning, as in case of fruits and vegetables, by milling of grains, or, if the product is a meat animal, by the many complicated processes of packing, the food is prepared for transportation. ”

“ Only a merchant who knew his business thoroughly—both his wares and his customers—could have thus displayed cooked chickens, hams and tongues, the imported sausages and fish, the jelly-inclosed paste of chicken livers, the bottles and jars of pickled or spiced meats and vegetables and fruits. The spectacle was adroitly arranged to move the hungry to yearning, the filled to regret, and the dyspeptic to rage and remorse. And behind the show-window lay a shop whose shelves, counters and floor were clean as toil could make and keep them, and whose air was saturated with the most delicious odors. ”

“ The Street-sellers of Eatables and Drinkables,—including the vendors of fried fish, hot eels, pickled whelks, sheep’s trotters, ham sandwiches, peas’-soup, hot green peas, penny pies, plum “duff,” meat-puddings, baked potatoes, spice-cakes, muffins and crumpets, Chelsea buns, sweetmeats, brandy-balls, cough drops, and cat and dog’s meat—such constituting the principal eatables sold in the street; while under the head of street-drinkables may be specified tea and coffee, ginger-beer, lemonade, hot wine, new milk from the cow, asses milk, curds and whey, and occasionally water. ”

“ A little shop, quite crammed and choked with the abundance of its stock; a perfectly voracious little shop, with a maw as accommodating and full as any shark's. Cheese, butter, firewood, soap, pickles, matches, bacon, table-beer, peg-tops, sweetmeats, boys' kites, [Pg 151] bird-seed, cold ham, birch brooms, hearth-stones, salt, vinegar, blacking, red herrings, stationery, lard, mushroom ketchup, stay-laces, loaves of bread, shuttlecocks, eggs, and slate-pencils ”

“ It is true that in our sojourning we do not possess all the luxuries and delicacies of old established countries and cities, but we have an abundance of the staple commodities, such as flour, meal, beef, mutton, pork, milk, butter and in some instances cheese, sugar, coffee, tea, etc., etc. ”