A FAMILY GUIDE.
In the ancient times of twenty-five or thirty years ago, the grocer’s goods consisted chiefly of codfish, flour, sugar, tea, coffee, salt, molasses and whale oil. There were also a little candy in glass jars, some nuts in bins, a few drums of figs and a box of sour oranges. The grocer himself found plenty of time to talk politics and play checkers across the counter with his friends and neighbors. Those were the days when a few conservative old merchants used to meet and discuss the tea market and allot among themselves the quantity to be imported, not a pound of which could arrive under twelve or fifteen months.
But things have changed. The importer now flashes his order under the sea and on, over plains and through jungles to China. “Ocean tramp” steamships are waiting to receive his merchandise, and within thirty or forty days it may be sending up its grateful fragrance from tea tables in the Mississippi Valley.
THE MODERN GROCER.
Nor has the enterprising retail grocer of to-day failed to catch the spirit of this progress and keep even step with it. He has become the Popular Food Provider, and his store represents about everything which is palatable in either hemisphere or any zone. As the world has grown enlightened and refined, his stock has become more and more varied and better adapted to the wants of mankind, until it embraces every delicacy of the land, sea or air.
His cunningly prepared sauces provoke the appetite and give zest to more substantial articles, while they help also to digest them. He has food fitted for the intellectual worker and for the laborer, for the invalid and for the infant. He practically annihilates the seasons and furnishes fruits and vegetables in mid-winter, as fresh and delicate as when first plucked from their native stems or vines. And, moreover, all the goods upon his sightly shelves are now put up in the most attractive, portable and convenient form for family use.
Food Never Before so Low.
Nor would a day’s wages ever before purchase so much of food products. In the English market, for the ten years from 1870 to 1880, the price of wheat was forty-three per cent. higher than the average of 1886. Sugars have fallen in price nearly one-half in ten years, and teas, coffee, and many other articles are proportionately low.
This is due to improvements in machinery, increased transportation facilities and the opening up of new and fertile sections of the earth, under all of which the world’s supply of food has of late years been greatly in excess of the world’s increase in population; and it is the grocer who brings these advantages home to our families.