Features From Old Shops

[albaqwerty]

thanks to Wendi for the idea and didn't want to hi-h#jack her thread.

I remember the old fashioned lifts, the ones with 2 metal doors and the lift operator wearing a green uniform turning the dial to the correct floor.

Also, the smell of different areas of the department store, some were really nice, like the ladies fashion area and the deli with their goodies.

Any others?

[viv38]

I remember a shop in Liverpool called George Henry Lee. I used to go with Mum when I was little and we went right to the top floor to the restaurant for a meal. There were often models coming round to the tables and posing in the fashions from the clothing departments while we were eating !

[albaqwerty]

thanks Viv! You've just reminded me when mum and I used to go the the restaurant for a meal too, although obviously wasn't where you were :-D

Fish and chips were lovely, the tartare sauce came in a little dish and not a peel-off tub.

[Buenchico]

I can't remember ever travelling in one of those manually-operated lifts as a child. (I don't think my parents could afford to shop in the type of stores that would have had them and there probably weren't that many in Ipswich anyway).

However I remember working as a lift operator in my student days. It was in the Churchman's cigar factory in Ipswich (which was part of John Players) and it was on the goods lift that took tobacco and cigars between floors (as well as conveying management staff, who were allowed to use it to get to the staff restaurant). The lift cables stretched with the load, so getting the lift to line up with the floor could be quite a tricky job as the controls responded differently when 'loaded' and when 'light'. It could often take several attempts for me to get the lift positioned so that there wasn't a big step up or down when entering or leaving.

[corylus]

The lifts usually had an expanding criss-cross metal frame door and went up and down in an open framework through which you could see every floor in the store as you went up and down. AND could only be controlled by the lift operator who spent his/her time sitting on a stool in the lift announcing which floor was next.

[catswhiskas]

Do you remember the cash being put into tubes and sent to another floor, always used to fascinate me.

[tonyav]

I remember those lifts, ah wench, concertina type doors.

[shaneystar2]

We used to have department store here where the money was put into a cannister and sent whizzing along a wire to the cash office .They put the change in it and whizzed it back .As a child I thought this was fascinating .
Lots of shops also had chairs by the counters where old biddies could have a sit down ...lol.

[stewey]

What about those vacuum tube systems that snaked mysteriously throughout the building and took your money and then delivered, as if by magic, your change...Or, in my case, my mother's.

[tonyav]

catswhiskas
Do you remember the cash being put into tubes and sent to another floor, always used to fascinate me.



I do, catswhiskas, Used have them in the main co-op in my town, fast wasn't they.

[wendilla]

I remember the lifts and the money tubes no point in having them now a days they would get hijacked on the way there lol

[corylus]

The other thing that springs to my mind is the politeness, helpfulness and courtesy of the shop floor staff!!

[Mojo-Jo-Jo]

Lewis's in Leicester had the oldest wooden escalator you could imagine, but only on one floor, the rest were modern

[stewey]

Sawdust on the floor in the butcher's shop.

[Buenchico]

Another memory:
Foyle's book shop in London (which is still the world's largest book shop and one of my favourite places to be) used to be owned by a lady who refused to have anything to do with modern technology. So, as other book stores were introducing EPOS systems, with scanners at their sales desks reading bar codes on book covers and automatically updating the stock lists, Foyles still did things the old way. That meant that a book purchase had to be completed as follows:
Step 1: Take your book to the sales desk for that floor, which usually meant following lots of hard-to-find signs through several departments.
Step 2: Queue at the sales desk (often for quite some time) before handing the book to the assistant, who would write the title and price by hand onto a sales slip.
Step 3: Follow lots more hard-to-find signs to the cashier's desk, which was on a different floor and accessed through a maze of different departments.
Step 4: Join a very long queue at the cashiers desk, then hand over your money in order to get your sales slip stamped.
Step 5: Try to find your way back, through the book-lined maze, to the sales desk.
Step 6: Queue for a third time before exchanging the stamped sales slip for your book.
(The sales slip would then be carefully filed so that new stock could be manually ordered).

[viv38]

I remember tartare sauce coming in a dish too alba.

Like others, I also remember the payment system using tubes. Again when I was a kiddie, Mum worked in a shop called Oxleys (no longer there now) and they used this fascinating system !

[Buenchico]

If you purchased a lightbulb (from either the local hardware store on our estate or from the posh Cowell's store in Ipswich) the assistant would always insert it into a lampholder to check that it worked first. (That was theoretically done as a customer service, to ensure that you weren't sold a dud bulb, but I suspect that it had a lot more to do with ensuring that people couldn't return a used bulb and claim that it was one that they'd just bought!)

[gness]

I loved those canisters that took your money and sent back your change...

Are there still Mutual or Provident cheques?......I worked in a shop in the sixties and it always seemed that the cheques had about fifty purchases on them...in £.s.d....when they got to me....usually on a busy Saturday
I had to add up to make sure there was enough left on for what was being bought.....I am a whizz at adding up now though....☺

[stewey]

Remember the vacuum tube testers for your radios and TVs in the stores?

[corylus]

Re: testing light bulbs before purchase that happened here in our local electrical/hardware store until a few years ago.

[horseshoes]

In Nantwich market, and I'm sure in a lot of other markets, buying toffee and the stall holder using a little hammer to break it.

In Woolworth, a wooden toy counter with lots of little compartments holding things like Jack stones, those funny material balls on elastic, little plastic purses, farm and zoo animals etc etc.