Goods and services purchased wholesale were items that our family grocer, Monsieur Pinard at Hildreth and Ludlam, and our Jewish variety store owner, Harry, whose shop practically faced our humble tenement abode on Ludlam St., needed to manage to stay competitive in the 1950s.
Small supermarkets like the A&P near Kearney Square in downtown Lowell and another, smaller store located at West 6th and Aiken St. in Lower Centralville were just beginning to make an impact on the purchasing decisions made by housewives and husbands in our small section of French Canadian utopia.
Ma and Pa shops abounded in Lower Centralville during the Depression years but also in the 1940s and 1950s. It seems like any property owner in residential neighborhoods could readily convert a spare room facing the main street into a walk-in variety store. Here, the customer could purchase milk, ice cream, tonics (local term for soda pops), canned goods, cigarettes, hard candy, chocolate bars, cereals, cakes, donuts plus chewing gum and M&Ms. Also available would be Alka Selzer, aspirin, tooth paste, mouth wash, Carter’s little liver pills, Clearasil, etc.
Also available, in some more advanced variety stores, would be a refrigerated display case of fresh hamburger, steaks, poultry and, maybe, even cod or mackerel. Note, however, that large scale refrigeration systems were still in their infancy stage so, frozen meals, sweet pies, enchilada dinners, pot roast, etc. were not available to the average retail buyer.
Our neighbor, Harry, had revamped the more usual Ma & Pa shop, which Laura, my mother’s friend, had run for years, into this higher caliber type of variety store – even giving Mr. Pinard, our preferred grocer, a run for his money when it came to fresh meats.
The bane of the small Ma and Pa variety store was the incessant hordes of little kids wishing to purchase penny candy, popcorn, bubblegum and tiny bags of potato chips. Usually, these big spenders had all the patience of corporate style buying agents, who weighed every potential purchase with serious acumen. In the case of the children, it usually boiled down to: “How much can I get for a nickle and two Indian head pennies?”
Life for the successful small shop owner was not always “peaches and cream” as any Stanford MBA graduate would testify.
Finally, in terms of wholesale pricing, our rough- scrabble, Bolduc household religiously avoided any traveling salesman coming to our Dana St. side door with a sales pitch like:”Why pay retail when I can get it for you at wholesale?”
Perhaps, as second generation French Canadians, we were not yet prepared to hassle with fast-talking city-slickers, who might be ready to pull the wool over our eyes?
Immigrants of all flavors in the city shared one trait that we all held in common, i.e., a deep distrust of any business deal offered by a Yankee (non-immigrant) peddler. Actually, immigrants generally tried to support their own kind of immigrant merchants whenever possible. The Greeks shopped at Greek-owned businesses; the Irish tried to fraternize Irish businesses while the Canucks – we were also called “frogs” – mostly trusted their business dealings with compatriots from decades before.
These characteristics were much more pronounced in the shopping habits of people, who still recalled their early, hard years of struggling in Lowell’s multi-cultural, commercial environment in the time-frame of 1890 to 1925.
Gradually, these ethnocentric tendencies lightened up where even old-time immigrants gradually included themselves into the general buying public.
But, what has happened to more recent groups of people migrating into the city from Cambodia, Brazil, Vietnam or Laos? Has the Lowell Experiment become the national model for the successful transplantation of immigrant elements into the fabric of today?
