Can anyone tell me anything about the 'self service shops' in Britain in the 1950s?

Question

Apparently they were introduced by bigger retailers, and had the first trolleys.

Answer 1

The Co-op may have experimented with "self service shops" before, but the chain that first expanded supermarkets (they were known as such from the start) in the 1950s was Sainsburys. The idea was imported directly from the United States, of course. The other early chain was Fine Fare - much more downmarket and the ancestor of today's Tescos.

I was a child in the 1950s and remember that my mother shopped in an International grocers in that had different counters for tea and coffee, dry goods like biscuits and for cheese and ham. All with their own assistants. There was a fishmonger and a greengrocer at the end of the road and a butcher a couple of streets away. The fishmonger had a marble slab, in a shop open to the road, to keep the fish cool. The butcher had sawdust on the floor and a cashier (a lady, the butchers were men) in a cubicle so that the men who cut the meat did not handle (unhygenic) coins. The amount people bought at once was limited: we did not have a car or a refridgerator even though my father was quite a senior civil servant. Remember that in the 1950s many middle-class women were full-time housewives. For instance if you were a bank clerk (therefore male) you would not expect your wife to work.

In 1959 we moved to Stevenage, which had a Sainsburys in the town centre. Quite a thing!We also had to buy a fridge as the new house did not have sufficient larder space! The supermarket was tiny by today's standards, perhaps the size of one of today's suburban conveneince supermarkets.

I do not remember trolleys in the 1950s, it was mostly baskets. As a New Town, Stevenage had a pedestrianised town centre with a bus station. There were few, if any, mulitstory car parks anywhere in Britain in the 1950s - these came in during the 1960s when many more people got a car and when there was large-scale redevelopment of many town centres. So if you went round the supermarket with a trolley you would not have been able to cary everything home!

Apart from the obvious of checkouts and taking things off the shelves into your basket, the other huge change was having things wrapped up with cardboard trays and plastic film. It was a major change picking a tray of, say, four pork chops rather than go into the butcher and asking for however many chops you wanted, either from the window or to be cut from the carcass if there weren't any ready. Also, whilst there had been a plethora of tins in the Second World War, the whole idea of frozen food was new. Frozen peas came in fast enough and there were fish fingers, but the idea of prepared frozen meals in cardboard packs was only just starting.

Plastic bags to put your shopping in were another early supermarket innovation. The local shops invariably gave you things in brown paper bags, and housewives would of course take their wicker shooping basket with them when they went to the shops.

I cannot remember it personally, but it is important to realise that food rationing in the UK did not end until 1953 (much later than the continent, even Germany). You could not have had a supermarket when you had to register with a specific butcher and hand over coupons. Also, the whole idea of food shops with lots of whatever you wanted was hugely liberating to people who had endured years of shortage not only in the Second World War but in the years of austerity afterwards.

Answer 2

I believe it was the Co-op who opened the first self service shop in the 30's

Answer 3

http://century.guardian.co.uk/1950-1959/Story/0,,105471,00.html

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Answer 4

The only places i can remember is cheap cafe`s and co-op.

Answer 5

no