My morning thoughts

                                            A typical grocery from the 40's and 50's
Notice all the light stuff on the top shelf.  It was fun to watch the clerks use a long pole with a claw attached which was used to grip the item and drag it down to the counter for packing.

I was sitting at the table this morning making up a grocery shopping list.  Today’s ritual included a review of the weekly Price Chopper flyer.  While turning pages revealing hundreds of items supposedly on special I started thinking of the thousands of other items on the lengthy shelves of today’s supermarkets.  I’m old enough to remember all the little mom and pop grocery stores of the 40’s and 50’s scattered throughout out the fair city of New Britain.  Most families only had one car. You needed a store close by because you had to carry those bags to your house.  One reason so many trips to the store were on everyone's schedules. You could fit hundreds of these small grocery stores inside one of today’s markets and yet they miraculously were able to take care of just about all of our family’s needs.  Of course the product choices available to us now would blow our minds at that time.  Just imagine having only a couple brands of chips State Line, Wise and maybe some pretzels as your snack food choice.  Today an entire lengthy aisle takes care of our insatiable desire to consume snack food calories.  Even dog and cat food consume an aisle. You had minimal choices for that bowl of cereal:  corn flakes, Quaker oats, maybe some puffed rice and a few I don’t remember.  No prepackaged meats.  You told the guy behind the counter what you wanted and he went in the cooler, brought the slab of beef out and cut it to order.  I don’t even remember seeing any fish in the store other than cans of tuna and sardines.

The difference between then and now is so dramatic our younger generation probably wouldn’t believe the huge number of things we were deprived of in those days.  Deprived is not a good word since these little stores actually provided us with all our basic needs.  You may note that we constantly hear the words “those were simple times”.  They were simple, but in so many situations limiting our choices made lives less stressful and more enjoyable.  It makes me think of watching women and also men standing in today's supermarket aisles shaking their heads trying to figure which brand of an item to buy (men hoping they made the right choice so they wouldn’t hear it from their wives).

We are very fortunate to be living in this American land of plenty, but so many times we are also in the land of “overkill”.  Retreating back a little to some of those simpler day’s might just make us a little happier and more relaxed.