Bradshaw
In their constant battle to grab more of our dollars than their competitors, some of the big retailers have come up with a novel concept. In some places they are delivering groceries right to the kitchen door. I hope I am not the only one to remind them that the idea is not exactly new.
Probably only a handful, at best, of the executives in today’s big corporations can remember their parents or grandparents picking up the phone and making an order first thing in the morning for the day’s groceries. But, once upon a time, believe it or not, practically every grocery store had a delivery service. So did the ice company, and dairies, and bakers, and even some coffee grinders.
My grandmother and mother ordered from Swice’s Grocery and General Mercantile, which was neat because Swice (who was kin) also sold hardware and lots of other stuff. He would deliver a bag of nails or a roll of chicken wire with the groceries. At least into the 1950s, Swice’s son brought a box of groceries before 10 a.m. practically every weekday, and heaven help him if he was late or brought the wrong thing.
Bradshaw
Swice may have been one of the last to give up home delivery and maybe kept delivering to us longer than to some others because Aunt Bab (his aunt, my grandmother) could be a very persuasive person.
The privations of World War II were probably at least partly responsible for the demise of home delivery. Grocers in Abbeville announced in the summer of 1942, for example, that “they will put into effect a Federal regulation limiting delivery of groceries to one delivery a day.” Grocers warned that one delivery meant exactly that, “No call backs are permitted in case there is no one home at the time of delivery.”
Those call backs would not have been a problem in my neighborhood. The deliverymen knew that everybody’s kitchen door would be unlocked. They just walked in, put the cold stuff in the icebox, and left the rest of the order on the kitchen table.
By February 1944, grocers, and everyone else, were feeling the pinch of “a growing shortage of gasoline and tires caused by the increased demands of our armed services.” By the summer of 1945, the delivery question nearly became moot because there was little to deliver. The Lafayette Wholesale Company, which supplied grocery stores and restaurants, reported that it was getting only 25 percent of the goods received in “normal times” and that the company was “lower on food supplies than ever before.” Some other wholesalers were getting even less.
It took a while after the war ended for supplies of gasoline and tires and groceries to return to normal, and by the time they did, “supermarkets” were beginning to replace the local grocers who’d made the home deliveries; ice boxes were being replaced by fancy refrigerators that could keep food longer, making daily deliveries not nearly so necessary; and new cars made it easier for homemakers to do their own shopping.
Aunt Bab and some of her generation still demanded fresh groceries delivered to the door (which may be part of the reason we remember their cooking so fondly), but even they had to eventually give in to modern times.
Which, it appears, are about to be replaced by new modern times that aren’t as modern as some folk might think.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at [email protected] or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
