9 minute read
HOMEtown Reflections
West Star Fruit, next to the Bluebird Groceteria on 20th Street, 1930.
Photo Credit: Local History Room - Saskatoon Public Library - PH-2010-210
Part 1 of 2
by: Jeff o’brien
It’s all supermarkets and mega-marts these days. People buy groceries at Wal-Mart and kids’ clothes at Superstore, and everything you could possibly imagine at Costco. But once upon a time, the mainstay of the grocery trade in Saskatoon was the independent, neighbourhood store.
The Corner Store
They were everywhere. Dozens of them, strung out along the commercial streets and scattered across the residential districts. They operated out of homes, sometimes with an addition tacked onto the front, sometimes by just remodelling the front room. Other times there was a store on the main floor and apartments above. They were named after the proprietors: Joe’s Grocery, or Minovitz and Hussman. Or they had names like the Sunshine Grocery, or my favourite, the Universal Grocery. I want to imagine incense and hippies, but it was 1930 so probably not. They were close enough
that you could walk to them, most often on street corners, which is probably where we get the name: the corner store.
The Beginnings of retail
Saskatoon’s first grocery store opened in 1883. Saskatoon in those days consisted of a couple of tents and one poorly built sod hut. But in one of those tents, somewhere in the Broadway area, Dr. J.H.C. Willoughby opened the colony’s first general store, which he operated through that fall and winter. By then, there were several wooden buildings in Saskatoon. One of them they called “the company store” (which it wasn’t). Another was a small house on 10th Street where, in the summer of 1884, Harry and Bessie Trounce opened Saskatoon’s first actual store in a room they built on to the front of their house.
The Trounce store was only open for two years. Bessie died giving birth in 1887 and Harry returned to England where he also died. But Saskatoon was growing. Listings in an 1888
H O M E Y O G A S T U D I O C R E AT E D B Y Y O U . H E A LT H I E R E N V I R O N M E N T C R E AT E D B Y C A R R I E R .
Minovitz & Hussman's store at 229 Avenue A South, 1929.
business directory included three general stores. One of them was run by Mrs. Grace Fletcher, Saskatoon’s pioneer businesswoman and a ferocious Temperance advocate who once hauled her own husband into court over a matter of illegal liquor sales.
This is all in Nutana, of
Photo Credit: CoS Archives D500-III-865-011
course. Saskatoon didn’t exist north of the river until the railway came in 1890. But where man (and woman) goeth, so too, does retail. By 1899, there were at least two stores on First Avenue, one on each side of 20th Street across from where the railway station then stood.
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XL Grocery at 901 Avenue C North, 1967. Ramshackle and rundown, the L&E Apartments prior to demolition in 1965. The grocery store closed in 1940.
Photo Credit: CoS Archives - 1100-1768-03 Photo Credit: CoS Archives - 1100-2006-01
The Growing City
As Saskatoon spread out over the next few years, so did the retail trade. In 1908, there were 16 entries in the city directory under the heading “Grocers – Retail.” They were clustered around 20th Street and Avenue A, scattered up into lower Caswell Hill, along Second Avenue downtown and on Broadway. Saskatoon had a population of about 6,500 people in 1908. This was a dramatic increase from the 544 they counted five years earlier. But things were about to get even crazier. There were 12,000 people here in 1911 according to the census, and an astounding 28,000 the following year.
People have to eat, and the number of grocery stores expressed as a ratio of the population was generally consistent. With the exception of the boom years, when the retail sector played catch-up to explosive population growth, the number of grocery stores hovered consistently at about one for every 400 people (give or take) until the 1950s. Even in bad years this was true. Saskatoon suffered through a major recession after the boom collapsed in 1914, in addition to a war in Europe. You’d have thought the grocery industry would have been staggering, with marginal players dropping left and right. Instead, the number increased. It was the same story during the Great Depression. What had the local grocers howling the loudest in the 1930s wasn’t near-complete economic collapse, but when the city started forcing people on unemployment relief to shop at the city-owned Relief Store instead of at their local grocer. To be fair, the shoppers weren’t much enthused either, since it meant having to go all the way across town instead of just up the block.
Specialization in the Grocery Trade
The larger downtown department stores all had
The brand-new City Grocery building, later L&E Apartments, in 1913.
Photo Credit: Local History Room - Saskatoon Public Library - LH-3860a
grocery sections and even then, these would have been fair sized. Not Costco-sized, but not someone’s-frontliving-room-sized, either. However, the majority of the neighbourhood stores were small, under a thousand square feet, with some of them half that. In those days, small grocery stores usually specialized. Some stocked only “dry groceries” like canned goods and non-perishables. Others were what the English call “greengrocers,” selling fruits and vegetables. Still others sold meat and meat products.
In Saskatoon, stores with names like “Star Fruit” and “Fruit Land” certainly imply specialization, and probably explain why some blocks on the city’s commercial streets had two or three grocery stores one after another. At one point, the West Star Fruits and Confectionery, at 245 - 20th Street West, actually shared an entrance with the Bluebird Groceteria next door.
But names can be misleading. A photograph of the Sanitary Grocery
Rex Groceterias advertisement, Jan 19, 1929.
Photo Credit: Local History Room - Saskatoon Public Library - A-1488
Grocery store interior, ca. 1910.
Photo Credit: Local History Room - Saskatoon Public Library - LH-3073
and Fruit store at 721 Broadway shows animal carcasses hanging in the window. Looking through historic photographs and old newspaper ads, you can find plenty of similar examples, suggesting that Saskatoon’s wily grocerymen were prepared to stock whatever the public was buying.
“Self-Service”—The Wave of the Future
A huge difference between then and now is counter service. Until the 1920s, when you bought groceries, you gave your order to a clerk who filled it from shelves behind the counter. But in 1917, a clever American invented the self-service store, where shoppers wandered the aisles picking out their own groceries, and then paid for them at the cash register.
Grocery store owners took to self-service like mice on cheese. One of the new groceterias, as they called them, could operate with significantly fewer staff than a store offering counter service. This cut overhead and made stores more competitive. Savings were presumably passed on to the customers, and ads for the groceterias made much of this fact. The Blue Bird Groceteria Self Service Stores, which first opened in 1922, guaranteed shoppers that their dollar would “purchase its full value in quality merchandise.” An ad for the Eaton’s groceteria department in 1925 promised shoppers the “freedom of the shelves,” calling self-service a “pleasure that once indulged in is not to be denied!”
Of course, as a 1948 Maclean’s magazine article pointed out, any reduction in overhead was “the small end of the self-service benefits.” Retailers of all sorts very quickly realized that given a chance to browse at their leisure, shoppers tended to buy far more merchandise than they would if they were standing in front of a counter calling out their order item by item. Self-service had very little to do with savings and a great deal to do with profits, regardless of what the ads said.
Along with counter and telephone service, most grocery stores in those days offered free delivery and payment on account. But along with self-serve, came “cash and carry,” which meant you came in, paid cash and carried it home yourself.
Cash and carry was also advertised as a money saver and a convenience. But the truth was that home delivery was costly. A newspaper ad from 1920 called it “the bane of the merchant’s life.” When Safeway came to town in 1930, opening five brand-new, self-service stores, the writing was on the wall for counter and telephone service as an industry-wide practice. Still, there were plenty of small stores delivering to homes into the 1950s, employing delivery boys on bikes with big front baskets and delivering mostly to seniors, as one person we talked to recalled.
The Second World War made grocery shopping complicated for retailers and shoppers alike. The Wartime Prices and Trade Board demanded that retailers streamline their operations in order to keep prices down, and then to show it was serious, instituted price ceilings and brought charges against operators who violated them.
Caught between dwindling supplies and rising prices,
Photo Credit: CoS Archives HST-045
store owners struggled. The answer was subsidies, and of course, rationing, which continued until well after the end of the war. But stores like OK Economy also announced an end to free delivery as a way to comply with the new regulations.
By the end of the Second World War, Saskatoon was still a compact city with a small-town feel. Even the chain stores, the Safeway and the OK Economy stores, were relatively small and they still had that neighbourhood vibe to them. But change was coming. As the 1940s drew to a close, Saskatoon began to shake itself free from the grip of drought, Depression and war that had held us hostage for so long. There was a new wind blowing, and where it was going to take us was anyone’s guess.
But that’s a story for the Fall issue of Saskatoon HOME. Watch for it September 2021.
Grocery store interior, ca. 1900.
Photo Credit: Local History Room - Saskatoon Public Library - LH-4014
