Looking Back: Enjoying the changing face of shopping in Sheffield

I also often shop that way for clothes and shoes. Oh, and household goods, birthday cards. In fact for many things. It doesn’t half save some time to spend doing more important things.

Interestingly, I find that the critics of this kind of shopping are usually my own generation. So many old folks are stuck in a rut, can’t deviate from the routine they follow religiously each day, and can’t be bothered to learn how to use a computer anyway!

So different from the shopping back in the day when my mother would spend all day walking from shop to shop.

In the days before computers, television and mobile phones, shopping was as much a social thing as anything. She could spend as much time chatting on street corners as she would in the shops.

This was the day of the corner shop and of course the good old Co-op.

The diversity of the goods sold in the corner shops was astounding. Bread but not cakes as no self-respecting housewife would buy a cake they hadn’t made!

Hairnets, combs, hardware, fruit and veg, pins and needles, bacon and cheese. Sugar scooped into blue bags. Tub butter and lard which were in big mounds on the shop counter and wrapped in greaseproof paper. Sides of ham and bacon waiting to be sliced, covered in white muslin. Tea was weighed out of plywood chests.

Potatoes and vegetable and fruit were placed straight into mothers shopping bag. It always had a layer of dirt at the bottom of it.

Anyone a bit strapped for cash could purchase one egg or one cigarette.

Children collected empty bottles; spending the money received on black jacks, liquorice and sherbet fountains.

Milk checks were bought from the Coop, meat from the butchers, fish from the fishmonger.

You could even choose a garment to wear at ladies dress shops, pay weekly for it and redeem it when you’d paid for it in full!