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How We Shopped
By Honest Abe Lincoln
Small towns had stores called, "Grocery Stores," that sold more than
food. We had two stores in my village named after the founder, Philip
"Gordon." Both stores sold food, and they catered to farmers with
harness, fly nets, milk buckets, and all the things the local farmers
needed. The store at the south end sold more nuts, bolts, and nails
than the north store did. I was always fascinated with the buckets,
fitted with rubber nipples, for calves to nurse on bottles.
Sandy Marcum who had been a clerk for seventeen years for Levi Ammon
and son whose store in the south end matched one he owned in Potsdam.
Sandy had a falling-out with Ammon and quit clerking and built his
"Sandy’s Cash Store" that became the store owned by Sandy and, Frank
and Opal Pinkerton, Clarence and Cary Beaver , Everett and Helen
Gentner and Carl and Earlene Morris. The store had groceries, fresh
meat, and a few odds and ends of dry goods and hardware—hammers, saws,
shovels, rakes, and rubber boots. This store also had the post office,
so twice each day people with a mail box walked to the store to pick up
their mail. A lot of people loafed there on the stiff back chairs while
waiting on the mail.
Stores were different in those days. Cookies and crackers came loose in
large cardboard boxes that sometimes sat on the counter but usually
were on the floor with a cardboard lid. You picked out as many cookies
or crackers as you wanted and put them in a paper sack and handed it to
Bill or Lillian (the store owners) to pay for.
When the cookies got web-worms in them, Mr. Boyer would tell me to have
my mother come down and pick them up. Mother carried the box of wormy
cookies home to feed to our chickens. The cookies would be covered with
worms and webs. We were poor and ate what we were able to grow, and mom
never had money to buy cookies. So we would set there and look in the
box at the webs and turn the cookies over to see if any worm was on the
bottom. Sometimes you had to look at several to find a "clean" one and
when we did it went straight into our mouths and we ate them. The
chickens liked the worms as much as the cookies and they got most of
the wormy ones.
You never "shopped" you just went to the store and bought what you
needed. It was done this way: You walked in the store and you stood in
front of the counter. Either Bill or his wife, Lillian, would come up
and ask what you needed. You could hand them a list or tell them what
you wanted. They would walk around the store and pick out the items and
set them on the counter in front of you so you could see what they
picked. If all the items were there then they would write it all down
on a sales slip and tell you how much it cost.
You could either pay them in cash or tell them to "put it on the bill."
If you had good credit with them they’d take the slip they just wrote
out and put it in a file box with the rest of your bills. You were
expected to pay it off on pay day or "pay something on it" when you
could. Otherwise you might be "cut off" and get no more credit.
For those like my mother, who had no real cash income, both stores
would take eggs in trade. Or they would take work in trade. Sometimes
when the chickens were not laying eggs, mother would clean wallpaper
for food. In good times, and we had eggs, and she sent me to the store
with a note and a dozen, freshly washed eggs, to trade for the things
she needed.
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