LOOKING FOR MR. MILKBAR

They are a dying breed. They soon won’t exist. And that is sad. But, to be honest, their death knell first sounded fifty years ago so the death throes hardly come as a surprise.

I am talking about the suburban corner store. The local milk bar. The very personal, customer-friendly, family convenience shop that, growing up in New Zealand, we called“ the dairy”.

These days Coles and Woolworth’s (and Woollies’ Safeway) are depicted as the supermarket villains and Frank Lowy’s Westfield amoebas are also tagged as guilty parties.

But I am old enough to know when the death sentence was really passed and why it was inevitable and inexorable. And I speak from family experience.

When I was eleven years old my weekends weren’t totally spent doing kids’ things like building a billy cart or going to the beach. Long weekend hours were spent behind the counter at my family’s Grocery & Dairy, The Belt Road Stores, in New Plymouth, New Zealand.

During the week there were other marathon sessions serving customers or weighing and bagging sugar and flour and rice and sultanas.

And there were the danger jobs: Cutting slices of cheese from a block with dangerous razor-sharp cheese wire or carving rashers of bacon off slabs of the smokey stuff with the whirring blade of the bacon slicer.

It was in the early 1950s when there was a local shop or milk bar on every second corner. It was also a time when Government restrictions were so tight that you had to board up your shelves in the grocery store at weekends and there was a phone directory -sized book on what you could and could not sell on Saturdays and Sundays.

(Not a far cry from the draconian and senseless Easter Sunday trading law that the Bracks Government has just forced on us in a flashback to the Fifties).

They were long hours for all members of the family for a meagre return. But you got to know your neighbours. Got to know their foibles and eccentricities. Got to know who liked “side” and who liked “ shoulder” bacon. Got to know about families doing it tough because everything purchase was “ put it on the book” and suddenly they couldn’t pay anything off the account on a Friday night.

And you got to realise that the wealthiest people in town were the slowest payers. Nothing changes.

But one day something happened in that world of the corner store. And it started the dominoes falling to the stage where there are hardly any corner-store dominoes left.

I remember my Dad sitting, puzzled, at the Formica-topped dining table and telling us that the rival store up the road had been sold.

The new owners were part of an Australian chain called Four Square. They franchised stores, with a distinctive logo and green and gold shopfront colours, throughout Australia and New Zealand and used their fiscal muscle to buy in bulk and buy cheaply.

Within months the bulk buyers were cutting such deals that they were selling cans of baked beans at prices my Dad couldn’t buy them for.

The writing was on the wall for the corner store. Four Square begat the supermarket chains followed by the humungous shopping centres.

The corner store struggled on but, like your friendly personal butcher, they couldn’t compete with the impersonal but convenient and cheaper supermarkets. Especially when a grocery giant would take a loss on, say, bread or milk, to get your customer into their shop.

Add to that the influx of the franchised 7-11 type store – an American invention that got its name not from the lucky numbers on the Craps table at the Casino but because, originally, they opened from 7a.m. until 11p.m.

Many of them now stay open 24 hours a day.

And then service stations got into the act. Can’t blame them. Petrol pumpers have such a slim profit margin on gas that they had to become milk bars. A servo makes more money out of one Magnum ice-cream or a packet of smokes than he would out of a tank of petrol.

Sure, people still frequent the corner store – the few that are left. But only in emergencies.

You pay the extra, the higher prices, because you have to. And they have to charge it. But your visits become fewer and your local milk bar owner can’t survive on your weekend packet of fags, bottle of milk and orange juice that costs two bucks more than at the supermarket.

As I said, this is a fifty-year evolutionary spiral that shouldn’t surprise anybody. But we have lost a lot because of it.

Kids are no longer dispatched to the corner store with the shopping list scrawled on the back of an envelope and a couple of pound notes inside. That’s partly for safety reasons in a dark, suspicious world.

Today’s kids – in the era of sliced, plastic-wrapped bread – will never experience the naughtiness of being sent to the shop to pick up a double loaf and then nibbling the hot bread protruding from the major half on the way home. Like a two-legged mouse nibbling on a piece of cheese.

But we have lost more than that. The drums of ice-cream from which deft wrists fashioned mounds for your cone. The “ spec” fruit – seconds which were sold for a pittance before being thrown out. The bargain prices for day old bread and the bones left from carved ham which made great starters for pea and ham soup.

Can we get it back? I doubt it. Is anybody trying? What prompted this column was e-mail from a 3AW listener lamenting the

“death of the corner milk bar or convenience store and the encroachment and cannibalism (hegemony) of supermarket power and reach”.

An irate Charlotte Frogman complained about the way that the huge VFL/AFL Waverly Park site will be developed into more than 1400 new residences and there won’t be a milk bar or even a 7-11 within cooee.

That wouldn’t surprise my Dad. He saw it coming.

Sunday 13th April 2003

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2002