What was grocery shopping like before the modern grocery store?

Italian grocery store, New York, 1943. Even after the big chain grocery stores local stores managed to hand on for a very long time for a variety of reasons, including neighborhood and transportation reasons.

I read an interesting entry some time ago on A Hundred Years Ago in which a person in their comments to a post (I meant to memorialize the post, and now I'm not sure which one it is) noted that their grandmother was shook up by having to go into grocery stores where you simply didn’t place an order on the counter. That is, the modern grocery store.

Grocer with his daughters, San Angelo Texas, 1943.

In keeping with the theme of this blog, this is something that is in area of inquiry.  How did grocery stores  in the pre Piggly Wiggly era work?  I’m so used to the idea that you go into the store and find what you want, and pay for it, that I’ve assumed they always worked that way.  But apparently they didn’t, or at least they didn’t fully work that way.

Indeed, photographs of older stores support that they didn’t work that way fully, as there’s always a counter and always a person working behind it, and a lot of stuff behind that person.  There’s usually shelves out on the floor too, so at least to some extent you must have picked up what you wanted but you must have also had to ask for some things.

Beyond that, what did a pre Piggly Wiggly grocery store actually carry?  Modern grocery stores carry a full slate of food items plus some hard ware and some periodicals.  Even the smallest of them is still a fairly large establishment.   They really tiny local markets I was in as a kid, and I’m occasionally in now, are about as big as most older grocery stores seem to have been, but they carry a very limited selection of materials (and the modern ones are often specialty stores).  We know that at one time certain items tended not to be acquired at a grocery store but at another shop.  For example, while groceries frequently had a meat counter (I think) people routinely bought meat from a butcher.

Indeed, people often brought meat from the grocer every single day, or nearly every day (keeping in mind that nearly 100% of retail establishments of all types were closed on Sundays).  Before really good refrigeration people kept ice boxes in their homes which were small and limited as a rule, so you usually didn’t keep a lot of perishable food items at home.  Anyhow, the common practice was to pick up meat to cook that night earlier in the day.  Other perishables worked the same way.

Indeed, while we never hear the term now, a common type of grocer was a “green grocer”, who carried nothing other than vegetables.  Big cities frequently had street venders who operated in this fashion, carrying a selection of fruits and vegetables to be sold that day, in carts, on the street.

All of which partially answers the question of this post and partially not.  Obviously grocery shopping was different prior to a century ago, and after that for some time (by the 1940s the big grocery stores were most places), but how different?