12/21/2023
A Christmas Story from our favorite local author, Cammie Quinn! In newstands today. Buy your copy at Lexington Finer Foods, Casey's, and Freedom.
Christmas at the Small-Town Variety Store
by Cammie Corlas Quinn
One of my favorite jobs was working as a clerk at a Ben Franklin variety store in the ‘70s. I was seventeen, and I made about $2.15 an hour. I wore a light blue smock with pockets, and I thought it was very cool to have a job that paid more than my $5-a-week allowance and to be trusted to ring up orders on a cash register.
It was an era when shoppers regularly purchased Christmas presents in their small hometowns. A shopping excursion to K-Mart or the mall in the big city was certainly possible, but such a trip was likely planned for the weekend. On weekdays, mothers were busy at home helping their children with homework, cleaning, ironing, and fixing meals. In the evenings, the family attended school ball games, band concerts, and VFW meetings. If you had to shop, it was more practical to shop at the local variety store.
The Ben Franklin store in my hometown stocked an impressive selection of merchandise. You could buy Christmas albums by the Carpenters or Andy Williams, decorative candleholders, fabric to make dresses, snow shovels, cookie sheets, boots, blouses, play dough, Monopoly, Wind Song and Emeraude, books of life savers, and plastic model sets of airplanes and ships. You bought gifts that you hoped would be a surprise – not gifts prompted via an internet link by the recipient. At the next-door IGA grocery store, one of my siblings bought me a block of cheddar cheese for Christmas (our family rarely indulged in anything more extravagant than American cheese). Another year, I received a can of Ray’s Chilli, which I considered a treat!
The greeting card section was in one corner of the Ben Franklin. I had the privilege of opening boxes of stock from Ambassador – packages of 50-cent Christmas cards and an assortment of red, green, and ivory-colored candles. I can still smell the bayberry candles, slick and bare without any cellophane or glass. There were wreaths to go around the candles, too – some frosted and some with tiny red berries.
As Christmas drew near, there were long lines of customers at the checkout counter. The cashier punched in prices, one digit at a time. Change was counted out backwards – quarters, then dimes, then nickels, then pennies. Most customers paid in cash or by check. A few used credit cards. In order to process a credit card, the cashier had to place it inside a hand-operated machine about the size of a pencil box. A duplicate form with carbon paper was placed over the credit card. When everything was in position, the cashier slid a bar back and forth over the card to create an impression of the card’s data on the forms, which the customer signed.
There were no bar codes. Price stickers were affixed on the merchandise by hand. Sometimes they fell off. If I happened to be running the cash register when an item came through without a sticker, I had to grab a handheld microphone. “Price check, please,” I would call out, hearing my own voice project over the whole store. I’m not sure why, but no cashier ever said it just once. “Price check, please!” I would call out again. An employee would come running and take the item from me, disappearing to find a duplicate item with a price tag. Everyone in line waited, chatting with one another about Saturday night’s basketball game, last week’s snowstorm, and Christmas travel plans. Once, one of my teachers happened to be in line and whispered a compliment to me: “I heard about your essay. Don’t stop writing. Someday you’ll write a book; I just know it.”
Sometimes a customer would purchase more than $100 worth of merchandise. For such a large purchase, the manager had to be called to the front of the store to double-check the sale. Did the volume of goods in the cart appear to match the total on the register? Was the check made out correctly? The manager would hurriedly scribble his approval on the check.
Christmas lay-aways were very common. With a small down payment, the customer could set aside a gift now, and then pay the remainder to redeem the gift just in time for Christmas. Those gifts were usually high-ticket items, such as a bicycle or a Pong video game or a set of Merry Mushroom cookware.
I knew almost everyone who walked into the store. Sometimes family members came in; a couple of my siblings worked there, too. Occasionally, my Uncle Bud sauntered in to buy a package of screws or work gloves. Or a lady from my church would come in to buy a neck scarf or a bottle of Breck shampoo. Or, best of all, a classmate I had a crush on would walk in to buy a can of shaving cream. Amid my duties, there were ample opportunities for conversations. And the whole time, I seemed to fly effortlessly around the store on teenage legs, practically dancing to overhead tunes such as “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas.”
Whenever I worked a full shift on a Saturday, if I happened to have extra money, I walked down the sidewalk past the IGA to Angelo’s for lunch, where I would splurge on an order of spaghetti and garlic bread. Usually, a fellow employee would join me. Buying my own lunch made me feel like an adult.
That was 48 years ago. I’m no longer working in a variety store, though I’m still Christmas shopping. Now, I can buy gifts from all over the world by touching a few buttons on my computer keyboard. I don’t need to wait in check-out lines, and I don’t need to rack my brain to come up with surprises.
Why, then, do I find myself wanting to go back to the ‘70s? Is it because I’m nostalgic? Well, yes! Sentimental? Definitely!
However, it’s not necessarily that yesterday was better than today, but rather, it’s that there was more big in the small than I realized back then. Doing things the tedious way can be more fulfilling because there are blessings tucked along the way. There are nooks and crannies of surprises when you go the long way.There’s no going back to the ‘70s, but in honor of my heritage, I’ll be on the lookout for opportunities to purchase a surprise gift, like a block of cheddar cheese. I’ll stand in a few checkout lines, keep my ears open for interesting conversations, and start a few of my own because you never know when you’ll have a chance to speak priceless words that someone will treasure for the rest of their lives. And that’s the best gift of all!
