Wellburn's

Here is a photo of Victoria's heritage supermarket, Wellburn's. It is situated on the edge of downtown on the corner of Cook and Pandora Streets. The building itself is interesting with quite a lot of ornate moldings and cornices but for me there is equal interest in the narrow slice of North American marketing history this store represents. This is neither a corner store nor a modern supermarket but seems to be a transitional stage in the evolution of the modern supermarket. For me this comes from the era when Department Stores had come to the forefront of marketing, before they lost out to the suburban shopping malls. Department stores didn't have much to do with food and stores like Wellburn's were an attempt to use the same everything under one roof technique to sell grocery items. I'm sure the history of marketing is much more complex than my ideas of it, but passing by Wellburn's always makes me think of how things change and how we got where we are. Wikipedia has interesting articles on both supermarkets and department stores and their development.

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I hope any local history buffs out there will tell us more about Wellburn's. I know it's been around for a long time in that building but I don't know much more than that.

Supermarket

As often happens when doing this blog I realize how much of our daily lives we don't really bother to notice. Here's an aspect of life in North America and Europe that we seldom think about, the supermarket. As a single retired person I don't need to shop much but even then I probably spend five or six hours every week in this supermarket. It's called "Save-On-Foods" and it carries nearly everything I ever want to buy in the way of food items. It's always clean and the staff are friendly and helpful.

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When I wrote the above I didn't mean to imply that only Europe and North America have supermarkets. I know they exist in Africa, Asia and South and Central America, not to speak of Australia and New Zealand. But what makes them a little different perhaps in North America is their ubiquity. I'd venture to guess that 90% of the people do 90% of their shopping in places like the supermarket pictured above. These vast stores are everywhere and even a small city like Victoria has many. During the summer months there are occasional small outdoor markets with many individual vendors such as are found in other parts of the world but these pretty much cease when winter comes and even in summer such markets do not come close to competing with the supermarket as the shopping venue of choice for most people.