Having debate with mates at moment…when I was a kid I remember my mother putting us in a two seated booth
In the supermarket to watch cartoons, while she shopped.
Everyone thinks I’m mad.
Can anyone remember these!!!!!
I remember in Co-Op they had old mechanical tills, same as Caters which was bigger, then Caters closed down and Presto’s opened and had the new electronic ones. Which use to go wrong quite often. But they used to have a wet fish counter and all the meat you had to buy from the counter, no pre-packaged lumps. Same with cheese.
(Suddenly feels quite old)
Then Presto was bought out by Safeway, who were then bought out by Morrisons. Who then closed the store down, with the loss of dozens and dozens of jobs, leaving the area with no proper supermarket. None of the little shops can cater for the local demand now so people have to get on the bus and go Tescos or Sainsburys. It’s made life quite difficult for elderly and not very mobile people though. And it’s had a knock on negative effect on the local street market too. Less people coming to shop in the area. 🙁
Hitons? I thought it was Litons are have I got the wrong one, it had leaf as a logo.
Can’t remember the cartoon booths.
I remember the big Woolco at Kenton though, we’d go there just before Xmas most years and I was allowed to stay and play on the video game and little hand held console things in the electronics bit.
I worked at Safeway in Bracknell in the late 90s (99 I think) and they had a play area for kiddies then. It surprises me that these don’t exist today. maybe a security thing?
Key Markets is where my mum did the shopping. £30 it was one week, for a family of 5! Outrageous!
She didn’t take us, cos we used to go “Muuum, muuuum, MUM! Get these!” “Muuum, muuum, muuum, MUM! Do we need this?”
I think it’s a Netto now.
Supermarkets? I remember we’d walk to the local grocers where my mum would leave her shopping list and then we’d pick it all up later.
I used to hate going to the butchers though – he always called me “snowball”, due to my white furry coat.
The local mini-mart near me was a [VG] which, we were reliably informed, stood for ‘very good.’ I wonder in hindsight if it was supposed to be ironic.
IIRC, they had a lot of own-brand goods that were, ahem, “competitively priced,” not dissimilar to the Tesco Value stuff these days. Google would suggest that VG was rebranded as Centra or SuperValu; I think ours was rebranded as a laundrette.
But yeah, anyway. I don’t know about a ‘booth’ per se, but I do remember a variant of the fire-engine type things that you could sit and ride in, but instead of rocking backwards and forwards till you vomited Panda cola and American cream soda everywhere, they sedately played WB / Looney Tunes type cartoons.
Did anyone else have the grocers van that would do the rounds when they were young? It had a door in the back and you’d basically step into a grocers shop inside a van.
We used to have a waitrose. it was where we went to get lunch from school on the days that you didn’t go to the chippy, It became a bejam frozen food store before becoming an iceland.
If my father had thought anything of our welfare he would have spotted the signs of urban decay and moved us out of the area straight away.
I remember Gateway in in the precinct in Banbury. I got my first Scalextric set from there. Because I was with my mum and dad when they bought it, I forever associated that shop with getting cool stuff.
I also remember my friend Tim Watts becoming rich when his parents sold a chunk of their land to Tesco to build the first out of town supermarket I’d ever seen (in Bicester).
I also remember a mobile shop that was run out of a converted 70s coach.
Did anyone else have the grocers van that would do the rounds when they were young? It had a door in the back and you’d basically step into a grocers shop inside a van.
Still happens here, seems to be run and frequented by the Asian community.
It’s a shame there isn’t more stuff like this. Occasionally some enterprising type will try to start a milk round or something, but it usually dies out quite quickly.
We had a Fine Fare, VG and a Nisa but best of all was waiting for the Apline pop man to come round to my grandparents every Thursday with the weekly dose of dandelion & burdock and cherryade, happy days!