Going plastic-free for the month of July requires plenty
of preparation and a lot of commitment, especially when it comes to planning
your weekly trip to the supermarket. Maybe we should take a leaf out of our
ancestors’ books; wrapping groceries in layers of single-use plastic was
virtually unheard of in the days before self-service grocery stores.
In the early days of the gold field, grocery items
came in by boat from Auckland and could be purchased from entrepreneurial folk
who’d set up shops in whare or tents. One of the earliest permanent grocers was
French and Co. Retail and Family Grocers, who opened a Thames branch of their
People’s Tea Warehouse in Pollen Street in 1871. They sold congou tea for 2
shillings per pound. Wood’s Central Cheap Store opened in the 1880s, and
dominated the Grahamstown portion of Pollen Street for the best part of a
hundred years.
Armed with a shopping list and a wicker basket, your
average grocery customer at Wood’s and the like could simply choose what items
they wanted, and relax while a shop assistant did all the hard work of finding,
selecting and packaging up their food. Cheese was cut from the block, flour and
sugar scooped out and weighed from big bins, and fruit and other produce were
carefully packaged up for the trip home. Rolls of brown paper, string and
newspaper were used to package the items. For the bigger items, especially in
the days before cars and refrigerators became common, most grocers had a van or
a bicycle for deliveries straight to your door. Maybe it doesn’t have to be so
different from today’s click-and-collect grocery shopping online!
Self-service grocery stores set out to shake up this
dynamic between shop keepers and customers, creating a lot more plastic
packaging in order to make it easier for customers to pick their own groceries
off the shelf. They first hit the market in 1916, when the first Piggly Wiggly
supermarket opened in Tennessee. The Americans were quickly won over by the
wide array of new stock, in bright packaging and at cheap prices. New Zealand’s
earliest ‘groceterias’ followed in Auckland and Dunedin in 1927, with the real
push towards Kiwi supermarket dominance coming with Auckland’s self-service
Four Squares in the late 1940s and ‘50s. Thames had to wait until the Shop-Rite
Supermarket opened in 1966 to experience the wonders of modern supermarket
grocery buying. Thames’ Shop-Rite Supermarket was in the brand-new Municipal
Building, on the corner of Pollen and Mary Streets where Stirling Sports is
today.
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