Dear LPG readers, 

Do you remember when so many more of us went out for the essentials nearly every day of the week, but thought a lot less about shopping for anything else on a whim?   Back in the 1950’s when I was a young child, one of my first memories is that of spending many a day being collected from school by my mum who then went on to stop off at one of the small and local grocer’s for something she would need for dinner that evening.

It is easy to forget that that was the time before every kitchen had a fridge and every family had one car let alone two.  We take food storage and bulk buying for granted because of those things that have crossed over from being luxuries into the realms of today’s necessities for so many more families.

Food and living essentials have always been staples of life although we now need to think about our food reserves less often because we have worked out how to keep them fresh at home for longer.   

But it seems to me that that daily shopping habit has evolved and we have gained an inbuilt need to shop for so many things that we don’t really need and, while we all need a diversion here and there, perhaps the question is how many times we will actually use half of them.

I don’t think that I shop a lot but when I get my monthly bank statements the evidence is there for all to see.  So many of us are able to shop without leaving the comfort of our homes these days and, even if we do, it is so much easier to tap the card than it ever was to fiddle about with your purse or wallet while finding the right notes and coins.

In our ‘look it up on your phone, click once and its paid for’ world we have lost that really important thinking time we used to have when we passed a shop window, saw it, and walked passed it on the way to and from school or work for a day or two before going in for the hands on demonstration and final purchase.

The youngsters of today no longer take the time to do what we would have done in our day.  They have been deprived of the thinking period that we oldies used to have; that extra bit of time to weigh up and work out just how much we really need it.  I think that most readers of a certain age would agree that this is what so many more of us would have done, even in the 1970’s when I started working.  

I think that the internet has robbed us of that time to stop and work out if we really need or would make use of things before buying them and, while we don’t make every purchase for cost effective reasons, the second hand clothes, shoe, and Knick knack market has definitely left the poorer end of our street markets and evolved into our boot sales and the electronic swap-shop domain in a big way too.  

FB, Lewisham 

For those who like figures and statistics, LPG has found some internet evidence

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