The "How were you raised" thread got me thinking and I went back to look at some photo albums. For the first few years of my life my parents ran a rural grocery store. My mother wrote her autobiography before she died and described how the business worked. I found it fascinating. Maybe someone here will too.
This is the store - the whole thing. Can you imagine a viable business today with cinder block steps to the front door?
Shelves inside the store.
It’s kind of a tossup whether the store was the front room of their house, or their home was the back of the store. The store was a one room affair with shelves for canned goods, a cooler for meat and cheese, and a small freezer for ice cream. Store hours were typical for rural businesses of the time – 8 to 6 most days, but 8 to noon Wednesday, and 8 to 8 on Friday. They were closed on Sunday of course.
The "parking lot" was the gravel driveway that ran from the hard road and alongside the house. (In an era when most roads were dirt or gravel, a paved road was called a “hard road.”) People would show up on horses, mules, tractors, doodle bugs, and sometimes whole cars or trucks, which were fairly rare in those days. My dad used to say, “What’s the difference between a pidgeon and a farmer? A pidgeon can make a deposit on a new car.”
I'm not sure why this picture is in the album. It just says, "typical" on the back. It is typical of the vehicles that showed up at the store. Even though I was only 4 I remember a doodle bug that a customer had.
They sold goods to locals from a five-mile radius for cash, but their business wasn’t that simple. To stock the store they bought canned goods, flour, sugar, cheese, ice cream, and sundry items from a wholesaler. For fresh meat they traded these kinds of things to a farmer for hog or a side of beef. The meat from the animals went into the “meat locker” in the nearest big town (Wilmington, Ohio if you’re keeping score).
A meat locker was a big community freezer usually run by a butcher. Since personal food freezers were rare in the early 1950s, farmers, or anyone with meat to freeze, would rent space in the locker. The meat was put on shelves in butcher paper packages with the owner’s name on it.
When dad needed meat for the meat counter at the grocery he would go to the locker and get whatever he needed and gave some in payment for locker space rental to the butcher who owned the locker.
I got this picture off of the internet. Whenever a store sold a taxable item they gave the buyer a stamp proving that they paid the sales tax. I don’t know if food was taxable then, or what my parents sold in the store that was taxable, but there are books and books of these tax stamps in the stuff they passed along to us before they died. I assume they came from the store.
The big money day was Saturday. Dad traded canned goods, flour, sugar, and sundrys to other farmers for eggs. He traded for dozens and dozens of eggs and on Saturdays took them to the biggest city around – Dayton, Ohio and sold them door to door. That was the source of most of the cash they received.
Dads first delivery truck was this '37 Ford panel truck in the parking lot of the store.
At some point he traded up to this Ford panel van. He took it with us when we moved to the farm and tore it apart, using the front axle to make a trailer.
The country was changing fast. Roads were getting better, there were more cars available, making it easier to get to Wilmington and beyond to shop. They closed the store in 1954 and Dad started farming.