Dear LPG

I was taking a look around the internet and saw this picture.   It got me thinking about just how much things have changed in my lifetime. 

The picture reminded me that when I was a child and my mother decided to go shopping this was the sort of shop that I would be impressed by.  We would visit a shop where all the shop assistants were dressed in white and everything we bought was cut and wrapped while we waited.  

There was no pre-packaging or cellophane over your ham and relatively few tins in the shop. In those days’ we children were able to understand a bit more about where things like ham comes from because, if your mother bought a few slices, the shop assistant would slice it off the joint while you watched.    There were no frozen goods and the only refrigeration shelf many people had at home was the window sill and shops like this did not offer banking or clothes.

I remember being transfixed when I saw the shop assistants put money in little pods which would be put into the bottom of a vertical tube which lead to a network above our heads.  You could hear the pods as they were ‘sucked up’ and travelled through the  tube network up to the cashier. 

 I know that I am not alone but , to me, when I was a child shops like Sainsbury’s were magical places but, in spite of all the changes and improvements that have happened in the past seventy years, I have observed that my young grandchildren and great grandchildren just appear to take it all for granted these days; prioritising on what sweets, toys and computer games are available as they are pushed around in the shopping trollies.

There are few assistants to help you find what you want, and shopping has become such an impersonal experience where you can enter and leave the shop having bought weeks’ worth of provisions while having only interacted with an automatic checkout system.   So many younger parents now buy these products on line that relatively few of their little ones ever visit such a shop and have little knowledge of the connection between the slice of ham in their sandwich and the pig that it came from unless they grew up on a farm. 

DY, Peckham

LPG has found a little information and also discovered that the money transfer system used at the time DY recalls was called the pneumatic tube system.  We have posted some information for those interested below. 

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