What’s So Super About Supermarkets?

“I’m sorry,” came an ominous voice on the intercom, “but our computers are down. It will be a few minutes before we’ll have our cash registers working again.”

Supermarket SigAlert.

Clerks smiled nervously at stunned shoppers as checkout lines ground to a halt and Muzak droned on.

“It shouldn’t be too long,” one clerk said before lowering her voice to add, “but to tell you the truth, I don’t know. This has never happened before.”

A white-haired woman at the front of the line I was in grew testy. “The prices are marked right on the packages,” she told the clerk. “What’s the matter? Can’t you just add them up by hand and let me pay you?”

“I’m afraid not,” the clerk replied. “You see, everything has a code number and all those numbers have to be entered in the computer so it knows what price to ring up and keeps track of our inventory.”

High-Speed Features

I rested my elbows on my cart, settled in for the duration and marveled at the high-speed features of the supermarket around me. Prepackaged meat, check-guarantee cards, plastic bags, computerized checkout and inventory--all “for your shopping convenience.”

Perhaps. But not on this day in Los Alamitos.

My thoughts turned back to the grocery my grandparents ran in the 1960s in the thriving micropolis of New London, Ohio.

With one door for the “in” traffic and the same one for the “out,” a metal awning to keep out the afternoon sun and a hitching post across the street, theirs was an amazing store.

Since it was too small to accommodate shopping carts, customers propped themselves up against the frozen-food cooler in the center of the store and called out their grocery lists. They’d exchange news bulletins of the day with Red Heilman, Bicycle Johnson or another of the regulars while keeping track of their own pile of goods without the aid of plastic dividers.

Gramma would scurry around the room, her clean white apron flapping as she searched high and low. Retrieving boxes of cereal from the top shelf sometimes was a team effort: Gramma would operate a “sky hook,” a long pole with a set of clamps at the top that were operated by a lever at the bottom. An occasional box would slip through the clamps and customers were obliged to make a diving catch for their toasted flakes.

Grampa would fill meat orders back at the butcher block just steps away from the walk-in cooler where sides of beef and pork hung on hooks alongside long rolls of luncheon meat. Even the hot dogs came connected. With the appropriate saw, cleaver or knife from the overhead rack, he’d cut meat to the customer’s order. Orders were weighed, priced and then wrapped in brown paper and tied with string that dangled from a big cone overhead.

True, my grandparents didn’t have enough shelves to stock all 57 of Heinz’s varieties, but they did manage to find room for returned soda-pop bottles and egg cartons. And there was a space around by the toilet tissue for Grampa’s volunteer firefighter’s gear.

Low-Tech Inventory System

Overflow stock was lined up in the basement according to the same floor plan as that on the shelves upstairs. Restocking was a two-person-one-broom affair: Grampa shouted out the names of products from the cellar. Gramma would answer from upstairs by thumping the broom handle on the floor once for each can or box she found room for. Grampa would then tote the cans and boxes up from the basement, his bald head and shoulders covered with dirt pounded loose from the rafters. A low-tech inventory system if ever there was one.

Grampa would total up the orders from the prices scribbled on the packages of meat and those I sometimes helped stamp on the boxes and cans back in my junior grocer years. My price-marking stints were infrequent; my family didn’t like me being seen in public with purple 2/89 marks all over me.

Bills for 15 items or fewer were totaled in the “express lane”: Grampa’s head. His fingers would skip from can to box as he recited the running total. Larger orders forced him to retrieve the pencil stub from behind his ear to jot figures on the back of a brown, paper sack. The total was punched up with a clang on a cash register the size of a highboy dresser, which occasionally had to be cranked when the power went off.

A little short on cash? Grampa kept running tabs for the regulars he knew he could count on to come through at the month’s end. And, no, no one was charged interest.

If you couldn’t find time to make it to the grocery, you just phoned your order in to Grampa early in the morning. Gramma would deliver the goods in half-bushel baskets later that afternoon via the company car, a wood-trimmed station wagon.

Advertising was done on the front window with white, chalky paint and a brush. Every week without fail, Grampa would artistically list the specials on the plate-glass while the paint ran down his arms.

Grampa opened the grocery at 6 a.m. six days a week and closed at 9 weeknights (except Wednesdays when the whole town traditionally closed at noon) and midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. Stragglers were never turned away. The hours were murder, but he seldom complained. “If I don’t take care of my customers,” he said, “they’ll start shopping some place else. That’s what keeps us in business: service.”

But that kind of service wasn’t enough.

A&P; Appears in ‘60s

In the late ‘60s, an A&P; supermarket was built on the other side of town. And with the big store came many customers’ introduction to shopping carts. People wheeled into the A&P; fast lane and never looked back.

Everyone marveled at the supermarket’s lower prices and wider selection and played its promotional bingo games.

Everyone, but my grandparents. There were forced to close shop and head into a retirement that they never quite knew what to do with. And they begrudgingly did their marketing at the A&P; but maintained, “Bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better.”

A sea of grocery carts brought to a standstill by a computer and the scores of sad faces that go with them proved that.

Gramma and Grampa would have bought tickets to see it.