Now I don’t know where Mary Ann did her food shopping or whether she had her favourite tradesmen deliver. Many people did have weekly and even daily deliveries. Look at any picture from the late 19th century well into the 20th and there will be the man or boy with horse and cart. Looking at the signs some tradesmen travelled in from Manchester while others were local.
If she did walk down Beech Road there were plenty to choose from. It‘s a topic I have visited before ** and I think it is enough to say that our shops would have been a world away from what we experience. For most without anything other than a cool pantry food shopping was what you did each day to ensure what you ate was fresh. Much of what you bought was sold loose and carried away in paper bags. Meat was still hung outside the shops for people to inspect and buying butter was a matter of telling the shop keeper how much you wanted and watching as he carefully cut is from a large piece and patted it back into shape. And if you were young enough not to be working but old enough to be trusted yours was the job of collecting the milk from one of the nearby farms and bringing it back in a jug. There are plenty of people who can remember carrying out this task.
But today I am thinking of the supermarket which has helped make a big change to both how we shop and what we eat. Now there were many powerful economic forces at work to make the big all selling supermarket our choice over the tiny corner shop. Producers were increasingly tied to the big chains air travel made it possible to source food from anywhere in the world and so break the natural link with the seasons and the car made it possible to do all the family shop in one go under one roof.
The downsides are all to obivious. The challenge to localism and the demise of the small individual operator, the monopoly of a few big players who can to a certain extent influence what we eat and the sense that as you push your trolley from aisle to aisle you are part of a huge anonymous process.
And despite the size of our local supermarket I am recognised by some of the staff who remind me of the offers I have overlooked and chat about our respective days.
Added to this I like the idea of making the choice myself, even if the fruit and veg tend to be a uniform colour and size and make me think that they have come out of a factory and not the ground.
In Italy they do still sell wobbly and bent carrots, odd looking peppers many of which still have traces of the soil they were lifted from.
So I wonder when Mary Ann first made the change to a supermarket. It may have been Tesco’s who took over the old Palais de Luxe by the bus station around 1958. In those days they were still in the “pile’m high and sell ‘em cheap phase. Or she may have ventured down to Whitelegg’s on the corner of Manchester Road and Oswald Lane which people tell me went self service at much the same time.
It is easy to forget both the novelty and freedom self service offered the shopper. Here it was now possible to “shop at one’s own speed; the older lady can select and move round easily at her own pace” while the “young mother from the corner house [whose] baby is teething and a wee bit cross, gathers her basket selects what she wants and is straight out to comfort young Peter.”** And according to the Co-op there were “6,328 satisfied customers in the first week” of trading at its new self service shops at Hollyhedge and Brownley Green in Wythenshawe which resulted in “trade increases, and flattering comments on layout and ease of shopping.”
She may of course continued to use the ones on Beech Road of which there were still plenty.
Pictures; from the collection of Rita Bishop and Graham Gill
*http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20a%20house
**http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/what-could-you-have-bought-on-row-in.html and
http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/shopping-at-market-place-on-beech-road.html
*** Wythenshaw Civic Week 1952
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