Well, as everyone knows Ireland and much of the Western World is having some economic problems at the moment, with “Dead Malls” even getting their own web site in America.
Ireland does not tend to have nearly as many large malls, except near larger cities. Where I live in the rural heartland, family shops were the most common form of retail when we moved here 14 years ago; over time larger super-markets have moved in along with some smaller shopping centers. Unlike the “mega-centers” of Dublin or Kansas, these tended to be four to six shops with a parking lot; and maybe a pub or coffee shop to park the husbands in.
One of the oldest of these Centers was in a large town we used to shop in when we rented our first home here. Even though we have moved a few miles away, we still sometimes have business in the area and like to stop by. Beside, the 50 year old shopping center, with its bright red sign saying “We Invented Supermarketing” was always fun to visit, with its funky mix of diet coke next to cast iron skillets.
The old man who started the place used to pick the background music…Did you know there are many re-recorded country and western tunes that have lines like “I left her in Limerick” instead of “I left her in Dallas?” He would often stop the music for a few moments to make unique sales pitches such as,
“Please visit our hardware department, we now have good men’s shoes! We know that in the past, some of our men’s shoes have really not been very good and not always of the highest quality, but now I can assure you the ones we have today are very good!” or
“Please buy our Christmas Turkeys, all our Turkeys have been personally handled by the management…”
We used to take visiting American friends and family just to hear the show. A few years ago, the old guy seems to have retired as both the music and the more unusual commercial messages were discontinued.
But the interesting mix of several shops (all really owned by the same people) selling anything from picture frames to fabric was still there. Complete with an old fashioned pub that harked back to the days when most Irish women did not drive and once a week the husbands took them shopping and took themselves for a pint (you could have a pint or two and then drive safely home in those days).
We ate one of our first meals in Ireland in that pub, that was how we discovered that “choice of vegetable” translated as: “three types of potatoes on your plate”. Boiled, mashed and fried…you could get mashed carrots too, but that was another side dish…
There was an elderly lady in the fabric department that was on a self-imposed crusade to insure that both wool yarns and natural fabrics were still available for sale, even during the dark years of sales reps who pushed nothing but synthetics. She would single handedly pick out yarns she knew that serious knitters, such as myself and a few other ladies she knew, would want for making their men’s sweaters. Against all odds, she kept a fully staffed and supplied cloth, yarn, and notions department going years after all the other stores had decided that any women crazy enough to want to do home sewing could drive to Dublin or Limerick for supplies. The button sales man loved her, she kept one of the only rotating racks of children’s and adult buttons going round and round for 50 miles.
The first big changes I noticed in our favorite location for Irish nostalgia shopping was when she retired. Understand that the Internet shopping arrived here quite late and even today is made difficult by various banking and mailing rules. That makes it much easier to just be able to go in and buy something very precious, so when I needed cheese cloth for making cheese, instead of ordering from the US I used to go to the fabric department to get the muslin this women kept for exactly that purpose (cheese making, butter churning, pattern making etc).
You guessed it, the lady had retired and the department was pretty much gone. Where all the wonderful fabrics, yarns and notions had been there was now just packages of beach towels, children’s toys and a few left over plastic bags of baby yarn, the sort sold in US Walmarts. It was very sad, but not unexpected, I was still able to go through the “men’s shoe department” and pass the “hardware, clocks and picture frames” to find a sun hat for my husband that didn’t have flowers on it. The sort an Irish women might talk her farmer husband into wearing if he was in a good mood.
That was about three years ago, before the economic crash, so we didn’t think anything more of it than just a sad passing of an era.
Our trips to the Shopping Center of the Past became less frequent, I started ordering children’s buttons from the US and cheesecloth in Belfast. But we still had reasons to go there, they still had items that no one else did. Real lard for baking, catering sized bulk boxes of tea, 5 liter plastic bottles of vinegar for pickling etc. Not to mention the pub, a gas station and Chinese eatery, small garden shop.
Well, about a year ago we stopped in, right after the banking crisis started and everything still seemed pretty normal except when I rushed over to the pub (where I had spent many happy hours with friends drinking tea) to use the bathroom. The place still had all its furniture, but the doors were locked. Overnight, it had closed and gone out of business, help there were no bathrooms! I was saved by the nice employees at the Supermarket who told me the pub had closed over the weekend, they let me use the employee ladies’ room.
Fast forward to two days ago, we had not visited this shopping center since this past Christmas. Back then, the pub was still closed, the separate hardware/shoes/clothing area was very limited but open and the Super-Market area was less cheerful than previous years. I figured that was a lack of “staff-supplied” Christmas music being replaced by the local radio station playing in the background. Somehow “The Jingle Bell Rock” is not quite the same as “Oh Come All Ye Faithful” played at a high volume combined with Management-Handled Turkeys..but I did notice that while there were more baking supplies than in the other shops (who had switched to mostly pre-prepared items and little else) it was much smaller than in previous years.
I bought my six months worth of lard, some big bags of sugar and some large plastic bottles of vinegar and we left.
Then we went back two days ago (June 2010 for those reading this in the future). My husband had a doctor’s visit so he dropped me off to replace my supplies of lard for baking and some vinegar for making pickles in the fall. Since I was going to have time on my hands, I decided to check out the rest of the small shopping complex before going into the Supermarket part itself.
I went to the old Hardware/Clothing/Fabric/Whatsit area and it was GONE! Not just closed, GONE. In its place were:
One tiny part made into a ladies’ costume jewelry and handbag shop – open but with no customers.
One used furniture place that looked like fun, I tried to enter but the place was locked at 11 o’clock in the morning on a weekday with a sign saying “please call for appointment,” I did not take this as a good sign for this shop’s future existence.
The pub – still closed
A “Coffee Shop” – part of the old pub, complete with exactly the same furniture, curtains and carpet as before but with one lone young women, a coffee pot and a few cookies.
You could go through the coffee shop to the old pub area to use the now open bathrooms, which I did. The place was like a tomb. Later my husband joined me there and we just stood and stared at the now dusty chairs, tables, counter tops etc., all looking exactly the way they had over a year before when they were put up for the night and the doors locked for the last time.
Next door to the coffee shop were a couple of boarded up windows and finally the pet supply store. Finally, some place I could use as I needed cat litter. I opened the door to find an open shop but with many dusty and empty shelves. Birds twittered somewhere but not where you could see them. A few large bags of dog food and lumpy dog beds were about the only other things in view. Oh well, I’m used to Irish shops not always having product presentation at US standards, so I went up to the tired looking woman behind the counter and said,
“Hi, do you have any large bags of cat litter?”
She looked at me as if I was from Mars and then said, “I don’t think so, then made a show of looking all over the empty shelves (for invisible products perhaps?). I thanked her and left, relieved that I could sneeze outside, I later found out that husband had a similar experience (minus the invisible product selection process) before coming to pick me up.
Finally, I headed back beneath the old “We Invented Supermarketing” and “Fifty Years of Business” signs, into the market. Here at least I was happy to find the products I was looking for, though I did notice a certain age range among my sprinkling of fellow customers. To call us “mostly of a certain age” would be pretty accurate and some cases “frail elderly”, maybe even “Methusalean”, might have been more to the point. The Dear Old Thing I had to walk behind in the baking section ended up having a daughter in her sixties come up to her saying, “Momma, come on this way, we’re over here now..”
Then there was the silver haired gentleman going slowly over each vegetable in the bin, hoping to find just the right cabbage to go with the bacon. There were, in fact, long stretches in the store where I noticed no one at all, before coming across another, ah, mature customer near the boxes of tea or cans of tinned baked beans.
What there was not, was almost anyone under forty in the entire store, even when my youthful forty something-husband came in to join us.
His first comments were, “Gee, this whole place sure looks dead, and it used to be so lively!”
Later, after buying my “old fashioned” products like lard and wishing I could buy every traditional cooking gadget on the far wall (with husband yawning in the back ground) we went over to the new discount super market to buy cat and dog food. Here we discovered where all the younger people had gone, lots of young mothers, babies and teenagers all out shopping for discounted cookies and cooking oil. I couldn’t blame them, we were pretty much doing the same things ourselves, but it was still sad.
The problem with the Shopping Center of the Past is not change, change always happens and some businesses will fold and others get started; even in the best of times. But the problem is that because of the current economic crises, many places that have existed for generations are closing and not all of them because they are outdated. Often, it is simply because the shop owner’s found lines of credit suddenly stopped, sometimes after forty years of perfect payment records.
I made a point of looking at the rest of the larger town as we drove through on our way to get petrol (gasoline) having discovered the pumps at old shopping Center were also closed down, as was the Chinese behind it. While my husband tried not to run out of gas, I started counting up boarded businesses and shops, I lost count somewhere between six and seven. Among them was the other pet supply store, the one we still hoped to buy the cat litter at. Also closed were at least one pharmacy, a newsagent and several places that no longer had signs above the boarded up windows.
This is pretty similar to the town we usually shop in, except there many of the places that were closed are no longer empty. As I pointed out in a previous blog, they are now “bookies” legal gambling places. I guess Depressions are good for some types of business.
So, I’m looking forward to baking with my lard and pickling with my vinegar but wondering if the next time I need them I will be rendering the lard myself and looking for a mother to brew the vinegar. At the very least, we may be driving to Dublin, Cork, or Limerick to find the same products; because I will be very surprised if there are Fifty More Years of Supermarketing in the Shopping Center of the Dead.
Recent Comments