Features no longer at the supermarket/shops

[Candodad]

For me I remembered today there was always a “cash only” till due to transactions with cheque/card taking longer.

Shops with Early Closing one afternoon a week and not open on Sunday.

Green shield stamps morphed into Argos.

Our local ish supermarket had a pancake bar that my mum would park me at then get her shopping.
I can still remember the pancakes and maple syrup. Yum!!!

we had a freezer shop in the village i grew up in that had actual, real live penguins in a concrete enclosure in the car park.

nobody believes me.

I remember when I was really little needing the loo in Safeway and my mum having to ask a staff member to take us to the staff toilets as they didn't have customer toilets! They knocked it down and rebuilt it with a crèche inside but I think that disappeared when it became Morrison's.

My mum used to leave me in the crèche in Asda when I was a baby when she shopped which would've been late 80s, not sure when they did away with them.

The Tesco one went in about 2000, I think. It was great - kids had to be signed in, parent and child got wrist bands and the kids were tagged so an alarm went off if they went near the locked gate.

The cheese wire used to cut pieces of cheese in Asda. Ours doesn't have a cheese counter anymore, perhaps others still do?

The satisfaction of that wire (and the provision of cheese) is what made me declare to everyone as a kid that I wanted to work in Asda when I grow up, and I still have half a hope of having a cheese shop one day :)

Our Sainsbury's still has the cardboard boxes.
One rather quaint thing (which still goes on) is in the US they pack your bag for you. Did they ever do that in the UK? It always catches me off guard as I automatically start packing and I think the packer (often someone with learning disabilities) gets insulted.

Oh, and those machines in supermarket entrances that played cartoons. My parents used to plop me in one of those so I could watch an episode of Touché Turtle while they did the shopping. I expect safeguarding issues mean they don't exist anymore, which would be fair enough.

The tape machine that the shopkeeper would use to seal your bags. The tape was usually brightly coloured. Our greengrocer let me do it myself once, I was made up.

LargeGin Is that the Asda that used to be a hyper market place in the wild mists of time 80's?

Our local Kwiksave had a plastic curtain on and out of the chiller section, Venetian blind style so you would push through it and the strip would kind of go over your head. And they charged for bags even in the 80's.

I was pleased to see the back of Morrisons selling their bananas pre weighed, having them hung up was great but the bunches were never quite what you wanted.

Scales to weigh your loose fruit and veg! I swear I haven’t seen these in years.

Those slidey card machines, when DD was little I had some photos done of her in Woolworths, one of those free photo things, but you just had to pick from memory which one might have been best. I got some others too and they used one of those machines. She is 14 next week, so we aren't really talking that long ago.

Our co-op had a plastic tube beside the tills that the lady would put notes ( as in money ) in and it was a vacuum that zooped it up to the offices above.

When I worked in a newsagents as a teenager I had to count the change into people's hands, our tills didn't calculate the change. I still do it now if I am giving change at a cake stall etc, old habits die hard!

Our big ASDA had a creche type place where kids could play whilst parents shopped, although under fives had to be supervised by a parent, which rather took the point out of it for me as a single mum, as I still had to shop with the youngests, and they were the hardest to cope with round a supermarket!

@josette

When I got married my mum and auntie pooled their green shield stamps to buy me an ironing board. It's still going strong 40+ years later. :)

Cardboard boxes by the end of the tills to put your shopping in.
Fish/meat counters open every day.
My local sainsburys still has all these.

To the person who mentioned Green Shield Stamps, they were stamps given according to how much you spent (like loyalty points) but actual stamps to stick in books which you exchanged for household items from a catalogue. I still have a Pyrex bowl and small casserole bought with Green Shield stamps in the early 70s.

People writing cheques

Re Green Shield Stamps.
Thank you for explaining them, I know my Nan collected them but never realised why.

Those floor to ceiling cages that housed the toilet rolls.

Co-op having a little grey machine on a pole at the tils that spewed out colourful stamps in a noisy fashion.

Prices having half pences in them.

Pre bar codes everything having price stickers on, which must have been really labour intensive, then it all taking ages at the till as it all had to be rung up by the cashier.

When bar codes came in I was about 10. I went on a school trip to Tesco to see this new wonder, then next door to Radio Rentals to look at the modern marvel that was Ceefax.

I remember when M&S wouldn't accept credit cards, and if you paid by cheque the machine printed the cheque for you and you just had to sign.

My local Waitrose has cheese cutting with wire and cardboard boxes at the checkouts.

Tickets for the meat counter, you took one then waited for your number to be called to be served.