It is 12th January 1948, and you’re walking down a road in Manor Park when you pass a London Co-operative. You need some provisions so you pop into this newly opened shop. At first, you’re puzzled by the lack of service, but then you notice other shoppers just picking items off the shelves. You think you’ve just entered a time warp and it’s 2024 with shoplifters helping themselves.
It is Britain’s first self-service supermarket that came to Britain 76 years ago on this day when the London Co-operative Society opened a store in Manor Park.
You accept the proffered basket, peruse the aisles and see that baked beans are on offer – you’ve never seen them so cheap. But as you pick up a can and place it into your basket, you can’t shake the feeling that the shopkeeper is watching you. You needn’t worry helping yourself is the way shopping is destined from now on.
But hold on, weren’t we ‘a nation of shopkeepers’, according to a derogatory comment by a Frenchman? For shopping etiquette is ingrained in British society, you went in and chatted with the shopkeeper, while the shop assistant ran around dividing and measuring out the items on your list, it was hardly an economical use of your time. You didn’t handle the goods – you might be called a thief.
In America they had self-service since the 1930s, it didn’t come to Britain until after the Second World War (although the London Co-op ran a trial in 1942, hardly sensible at the tail end of the Blitz).
With the arrival of self-service and its lower operating costs prices fell. Many of the traditional shops that clung to the old ways soon found themselves out of business. Soon Premier Supermarket opened a self-service store in Streatham, Marks & Spencer followed that same year in Wood Green.
Today we are returning to Napoleon’s assertion, with customers shopping online and preferring to visit smaller, more personal in-town shops, the big supermarkets are finding out what it’s like to be on the wrong side of change.
Featured image: Shopping in supermarket by Marco Verch (CC BY 2.0 DEED).
CabbieBlog 
Where I live, there is little evidence of supermarkets being on the wrong side of change. There are 4 large supermarkets (Tesco, Morrison, Aldi, Lidl, plus a smaller Co-Op) in our local town, serving a poulation of less than 20,000. At weekends, you would struggle to get a parking space in any of them.
The first supermarket I remember my mum shopping in was a Fine Fare. She got her bargains in there, but still bought meat from a butcher and vegetables from a greengrocer. She carried on doing that until she died in 2012.
Best wishes, Pete.
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I remember the Coop giving out their money tokens and having a enclosed cash desk.
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