shoppingprocess early
20th century weights
and
measures old bakers
shops old butchers
shops old
fishmongers old grocers
shops old
Co-op shops old
dairies old
greengrocer
shops old sweet
shops
How people used to shop in early-1900s Britain
Where people shopped; prices and the money they used; opening hours; why so time-consuming and labour-intensive. Edited by the webmaster from the previously unpublished written recollections of the webmaster's mother with firsthand contributions from others. For individual shops, see the above menu.
Location and style of shops
Women shopped locally for everyday items when I was a child in the early 1900s, and I sometimes went with my mother to our local shops in Edmonton. (Never with my father, as it was unheard of for men to be seen doing women's work.) There were always rows of small shops in any town and a general store in villages.
Most of the shops were built with flats above for the shop keepers, but some shopkeepers opened shops from the front rooms of their Victorian/Edwardian terraced houses - see for example, the photo of the drapers shop front in Leicester.
Prices of goods and the pre-decimal money
We paid in pounds, shillings and pence, i.e. £-s-d. In practice, though, most things we ever bought in the early 1900s only cost a few coppers (i.e. pre-decimal pennies). More expensive things were normally priced at a penny below the next shilling. There are separate pages on how these prices were displayed in shop windows, how they were written in handwriting and how they were pronounced.
Shops opening times
Why shops stayed open late on Saturdays
contributed by Bert Felgate
whose family owned a greengrocer shop
Men worked a five and a half day week and were paid on a Saturday morning. After that there was money in people's pockets. So shops would be open till perhaps 8 pm and even later on Saturdays.
Why shopping was time-consuming
There were no supermarkets to sell everything in one visit. So we had to go to all sorts of different shops for different things - see the above menu. So shopping was a lengthy business. This was especially so because everyone was served individually and had to wait while the shopkeeper went to get or take out every single item. Also many of the goods had to be weighed and wrapped for each customer, and social chit-chat was expected. Queues were normal. It was, though, quite interesting for me, as a child, to stand and watch the shopkeepers rapidly manipulating the weights on the scales as we waited in turn to be served. They did it so quickly and they always seemed to get it nearly right just from size alone.
Why shopping was labour-intensive
Quite apart from the time that shopping took, it really was hard physical work. This was because we had no cars to carry our purchases back home, and the wickerwork baskets were heavy even before anything was put in them. It was common to have to go out several times, just because people couldn't carry what they needed in one go.
Fortunately, it was common for shops to deliver. It was also common to send children on small errands. I often had to go and pick something up when my mother ran out. No one paid any attention to whether this was safe, but it always seemed to be. Small corner shops often meant that children just had to walk down the road without crossing it. If they did have to cross, traffic was light in side roads and slow moving at the walking pace of the horses.
Wickerwork (cane) shopping basket, courtesy of Richard Cole. Such baskets were heavy even when empty. They were made in the early 1900s by professional basket makers.
How goods were wrapped
Note from the webmaster
My mother wrote nothing about how loose goods were wrapped, but I understand that that it was much as I remember in the early 1940s.
Paper bags on a string, ready for one to be torn off for use.
Some goods like potatoes were tipped straight into the customer's basket, suitably lined with newspaper.
Small goods were packed in white paper bags which were often printed with the name of the shop for publicity purposes - although this was an extravagance that could not be maintained later, during the austerity of the Second World War. Larger goods went into brown paper bags. The paper bags were supplied by the shopkeeper who kept them on a thin string and tore one off as it was needed.
Heavy goods went into sacks and were delivered.
In my mother's time in the early 1900s, children's sweets went into a cone of twisted newspaper.
| sources | webmaster | contact |
Text and images are copyright
If you can add anything to this page or provide a photo, please contact me.
