A Monday Memory....

The news is reporting today that the A&P supermarket chain is filing for bankruptcy.  The company’s formal name is the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co.  Formed in 1859 as The Great American Tea Co. it was renamed to its current form in 1869. So not only does it feel like it's been around forever, it nearly has!  But for how much longer, who knows.

If my memory serves me correctly, it was in an A&P store in Brooklyn that my Dad had his first job. That would have been around 1930!  In those days, as he recalled, food items did not come prepackaged.  He would have to measure out the sugar and flour, and weigh up the potatoes and other produce.  After fetching and assembling what the customer required from the various shelves and barrels, he would then wrap the items up using brown paper and string.  Often, he would then have to deliver the packages to the apartment of the customer.  There certainly was a lot of hard work involved those days if you were a store clerk!

Growing up, I recall my Dad liked to bag all of the groceries himself as they came off the conveyor belt.  He didn't care for the way items were carelessly tossed into the bags by the store staff.  He preferred to "double bag" the brown paper bags provided and properly assemble the items, being careful to place heavy items on the bottom and frozen foods together.  He got it down to a science, really, and I watched carefully in order to learn from him.

When he became a "Senior Citizen" my Dad took great delight in shaking up, so to speak, the cashiers. If the total on the receipt came to something like, $23. 17, he would hand them $25.33. Then he'd stand there, grinning from ear to ear, watching them try to make out why he had done that and how much change they had to give him.  (This would have been back in the "late 70's, before the registers did all the figuring out!) If my mother chided him for doing it, he simply laughed and said it was one of the few perks of being old.  

I suspect he would have liked today's supermarket systems, where you can "self check" all your items, then simply swipe your credit card, bypassing the store staff completely and exiting quicker.  

Except he would have left without his mischievous grin!