Ancient Groceries

Extract

These notes were compiled for a lecture to the grocersapos; assistants and apprentices of Liverpool, early in 1910, but have been revised and somewhat elaborated.

Let us begin by defining our subject. What are Groceries? The con-tents of a grocerapos;s shop are various, and some are common to grocersapos; shops and more special establishments. Some of these (1) are perhaps not strictly ‘groceries’ at all, (2) are absent from early lists of groceries; e.g. tea and coffee, which formerly had their own ‘warehousemen’, and this process of encroachment and regrouping still goes on. What then are the sources and the purposes of all these? Every business of supply is a matter of adapting means to ends. The ends are not set by the business man, but by the public, the customers. The means also are not created by the business man; they exist, or are made, elsewhere and among other peoples. The business man is the middleman who organizes the supply to meet the demand for something which the consumer either cannot supply for himself or only at a disproportionate and therefore unbusiness-like effort.

In looking, therefore, at the early history of what was to become a ‘grocery’ business, we are asking three questions: as to the purposes which groceries serve, the sources which fulfil them, and the methods by which the ‘grocer’ adjusts supply to demand. In a modern grocer's shop, then, we may classify its contents in respect of the purposes which they serve, and the means which fulfil these ends.