Woolies

[poliphilo]

Woolworths has gone into receivership. The news shocked me slightly.  It had always been there. It was a fixture of the British high street.  Not that I'm sorry- except for the staff, for whom its a bummer- because I never loved it.  I had my reasons. One reason is I'm a snob, another is I don't like my shops brassy, ugly and fluorescent and a third is that in 1959 one of their shop assistants grabbed me,  told me I looked a mess, straightened my collar and rolled my sleeves up neatly- and if there's one thing I hate it's being fussed over by mother hens.  Ailz's pa says it's her fault for doing all her shopping online and- while we've never ever done our real-life shopping at Woolies so can't be accused of deserting it- he does have  a sort of a point. Woolies is the lazy store, the one that that refused to move with the times. It was the prototype of both the budget shop and the supermarket, but stayed exactly where it was- continuing to offer the mid-century shopping experience- cheap, cheaper, cheapest- whilst the fully-evolved budget shops and supermarkets under-cut and outstripped it.  When you think about it ,"The wonder of Woolies" (remember that slogan?) is that it lasted as long as it did .

Comments

[currawong.livejournal.com]

I was very well brought up too ...well, strictly brought up at any rate ... but on certain occasions, a wild streak that never would be contained boiled up ... being molested by a shop assistant would have been one of those occasions.

I was such a compliant little thing that, on the rare occasions when I said "NO!" and meant it, it left my parents in a state of total disbelief.
Twosuch occasions were my absolute refusal to keep going to boy-scouts where I was bullied, and my point-blank refusal at the age of 12 to continue with the haircut that my father approved.

That one provoked scenes like the "Please Sir, I want some more" moment in "Oliver Twist".

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I hated the boy scouts. I wasn't bullied- I just didn't have any friends there and couldn't see the point.

Later I got thrown out of the Duke of Edinburgh's Award Scheme for failing to get any points and embarrassing the school by an act of trespass (which was really the teacher's fault for not checking beforehand that the land he was sending us orienteering across was private property- I was the victim of a cover- up!)

[currawong.livejournal.com]

A cover-up ... how glamorous.

The only thing I have ever been thrown out of was the Griffith Arts festival concert ... this incident bagan when two Isadora style dancers in their white gauzy greco costumes performed an Arcadian interpretive dance that left my companion and I primed for a giggling fit.

They were followed by a contralto of a certain age, ample figure and extreme buxomness who proceeded to sing "Climb Every Mountain" ... (to understand the effect you will have to sing it to yourself with the final word of each line sung absolutely flat) ...the effect is hilarious. Needless to say, we were the only ones in the audience who cracked up, and we and were escorted, howling with laughter and very much ashamed of ourselves, from the auditorium.