20 Ways 1950s Grocery Stores Worked Nothing Like Today

A nesting shopping-cart design, patented by Orla Watson and later licensed by Sylvan Goldman’s company, was popularized by grocery stores in the late 1940s and carried through the 1950s. It replaced the double-basket cart and also came with a fold-down seat at the front of the cart for children to sit on. There was no strap, no belt; that safety feature wouldn’t come until several decades later.

There were cigarette racks without locks at the cash register, and coin-operated vending machines by the door that sold packs for a handful of coins. Nobody asked your age, and there was no Surgeon General’s warning on the pack. That warning didn’t appear until the Surgeon General’s report came out in January 1964.

In the 1950s, a stock clerk would use a Garvey marker (a spring-loaded ink stamper) to manually stamp the price on every can, box, and jar. The cashier would then look at the stamped price and enter it into the cash register by hand. Commercial barcode scanners wouldn’t arrive until 1974, at a Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio.

Most stores offered a coin-operated ride for the kids. The most famous was Bally Manufacturing’s “Champion” horse (1951). You put in a dime for a one-minute ride, and you were on your way while your parents shopped. These coin-operated rides remained popular throughout the decade.

For every 10 cents of purchases made at a grocery store or other retailer, cashiers handed customers a small, green adhesive-backed paper stamp. Customers pasted these into 24-page binder books, which required around 1,200 stamps to fill. The collectors could trade the completed books for merchandise in Redemption Centers or mail-order from the S&H Green Stamps Catalog.

The meat counters changed to self-serve, open refrigerated cases. The meat was still cut behind the counter by a butcher, on a heavy maple butcher block with sawdust around it to absorb moisture. Then it was wrapped in cellophane and heat-sealed. You just walked over and selected your own meat, and it already had a price on it.

Refrigeration also made it possible for stores to install an open horizontal freezer cabinet, letting consumers reach through a wave of chilled air to pick up their frozen meal. The frozen dinner was a huge hit. In 1953, Swanson offered its aluminum tray TV Dinner of turkey and sold more than 10 million dinners the next year.

In some of the stores, there were rubber mats embedded in the floor, part of Stanley’s Magic-Door system. You stepped on one, and you closed an electrical circuit that caused a pneumatic or hydraulic arm to swing the glass door open. No motion sensor. No infrared beam. Just a mat.

NCR and others built electromechanical registers with motor bars and mechanical key stems. Pressing a key would drive a set of gears, make a bell ring, and pop up a numbered metal flag behind a small glass window to show you the price. There was no screen or electronics calculating anything, just gears.

Under state and municipal “Blue Laws,” grocery stores were required to be closed on Sundays in order to provide a day of rest. Aside from those restrictions, most stores were open from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm during the week, though a few stayed open as late as 9:00 pm on Thursday or Friday. These laws were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1961.

The Kroger chain and A&P employed uniformed home economists, who staffed demonstration kitchens in their stores and distributed recipe cards that taught shoppers how to prepare new varieties of canned, dried, and frozen processed foods. A cooking class in the middle of a grocery store? Sign me up!

Supermarkets also offered “continuity promotions.” If you spent a certain amount per week, usually about $5.00 or $10.00, you would be eligible for a special deal on a Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia volume or a piece of a chinaware set. It took months of trips to get the whole collection.

There were even some chains with motorized roller conveyors to move groceries to cars without shoppers pushing carts through the crowded lot. Cashiers would bag groceries into a numbered bin that rolled out to a covered pickup shack. Drivers would pay inside, then turn in their matching claim tag, handed to them at checkout, to a waiting attendant. You still shopped and checked out in the store, though. There was no drive-through, no order-and-pickup at a window.

Produce was sold out of big wooden bins filled with crushed ice. Clerks weighed produce on a hanging spring scale and wrote the price on the bag in a grease pencil (a stick of dark wax). No digital scale, no price sticker.

In 1956, NCR introduced the Class 61 Change Computing Register. Here, a cashier would simply enter the amount of cash tendered, and gears and more gears determined the correct change to be returned. Not one digital or electronic component. A small step forward for a decade that saw lots of them.

Chain stores required immediate cash payment. Small grocery stores may have had a “tab” (a handwritten account book) for local people who would get their paychecks and come back to settle up with the owner.

Chain supermarkets accepted either cash or a valid local personal check. Bank cards were still decades away from the grocery checkout. Even BankAmericard, which would become Visa, didn’t debut until September 1958. No swiping. Just bills and coins at the till.

The Muzak Corporation enlisted the help of sound engineers to play soft, instrumental, nonvocal music in supermarkets to cover the sounds of cash registers and shopping carts. The goal was to make shoppers feel more relaxed and less hurried while they filled their carts.

Each aisle terminated in a towering, multi-level display of canned goods. The stock clerks stacked these by hand, since there was no fixed shelving to support them. There were dozens of cans in each aisle, with little cardboard signs, shelf talkers, proclaiming 3 Cans for 29 Cents.

Since the plastic bag wasn’t invented yet, everything had to be packed in those thick, brown kraft paper bags. The bagger would put all the heavy cans on the bottom with bread and eggs on top, and then someone would carry them out to the car for free.

This content was created with the help of AI.