GOING DOWN - LADIES UNDERWEAR

Man of Errors' latest post here took me back to my days growing up in Wellington. I remember the old Kirkaldie and Stains department store. I also remember the ones that he is too young to remember - DIC, which used to be close to Kirkaldie and Stains in Lambton Quay and James Smith's which used to be on the corner of Cuba Street and Manners Street. These were huge, multi-floored operations with, as MoE says, escalators and lifts with uniformed attendants. I remember the old guy (probably younger than I am now) cracking us up by saying in his strange way of speaking "Going down. Ladies underwear first floor" If he ran the words together it used to sound funny and rude (hey, we were only 10 or so OK).

Friday late night shopping was an occasional chance to spend our weekly pocket money (2 and 6 pence). James Smiths had a great restaurant that occupied the best part of one floor. Fish and chips on a plate with lemon and a salad was a treat at about a shilling. These department stores had a vacuum system for handling receipts and money. It worked by the sales assistant putting the customers money and the hand-written docket into a small tube (metal or glass) which was then put into an overhead pipe that ran , with many tributaries back to the central office where a cashier would stamp the docket and return with the correct change. The small tube could be seen whizzing away through the larger pipe. We used to find this fascinating and would stand there gawking until we were moved along. Modern point of sale equipment is not half as exciting as this system was.

Man of Errors made reference to Bill Bryson's The Thunderbolt Kid where he quoted:

"That was the glory of living in a world that was still largely free of global chains.  Every community was special and nowhere was like everywhere else.  If our commercial enterprises in Des Moines weren’t the best, they were at least ours.  At the very least, they all had things about them that made them interesting."

There were very few chain shops when I was a kid and certainly no global ones. I remember the first McDonald's in Wellington city. It was in Courtenay Place and opened in 1979. Everything went downhill from there. Bryson's observation is apt. Global retail and global brands rob communities of their own sense of place. I remember feeling this when coming across Irish pubs and McDonald's restaurants in France years ago. I was looking for 'authentic' experiences and at every turn was a bloody global franchise spewing out pap.

As a kid in Wellington we had local soft drinks. It was only later that Coca Cola was added to with a range of other drinks like Fanta. Our local was Thomson and Lewis.
We didn't have national bakery brands either. Each town and city had its own bakers and brands. Things have to move on I know but it is a shame when the 'improvements' bring along loss of culture, identity and the sense of belonging.