THE SATURDAY SHOP

Bring your baskets, by Ruth Spencer

As the plastic bag ban starts to bite, we can sympathise with the shoppers addressed by this notice from the 1940s. Instead of cartons and wrapping being provided, the restrictions of war rationing demanded that shoppers of the day, like us, bring their own sustainable, reusable carriers from home.

As we buy yet another “reusable” bag because we accidentally left our other 16 reusable bags at home, we might consider a basket. Sturdy, capacious and having a certain rustic chic, have we overlooked the basket’s useful charm?

It’s hard to get people to adopt a new behaviour, however noble. This notice clearly caused some confusion, because someone has felt it necessary to draw a little arrow between A and BASKET and write EMPTY above it. This is so intriguing, because not only does it make the sign excitingly ungrammatical, it suggests some interesting possible scenarios.

Were people bringing in full baskets?

Did some think it was a call to bring in their leftovers (“avoid waste”) to redistribute to a hungry nation, like some kind of patriotic bringa-plate?

Were people trying to donate their old baskets to the cause? We can only speculate at the basket-based chaos that caused a harried grocer to wield his desperate pencil.

In most parts of New Zealand there was no grocery delivery service, so the housewife of the 1940s was obliged to lug the family’s shopping home. It’s often noted, as though it were quaint, that women would shop daily for food — but you wouldn’t be doing a weekly shop either if you had to pop it over your arm and trudge back to the bungalow.

Consider the awful Fridays before Saturday trading, when you had to get your weekend supplies in, too. Charm aside, for most 1940s housewives, shopping was in the proverbial too-hard basket.