When I was growing up, my favorite store was Boyer’s store on South Main Street. It had been there since the town was platted. Bill and Lillian Boyer owned the store during the war years, and it was to them that I delivered a dozen fresh eggs and asked them to trade my eggs for a pound of cheese or a piece of bacon. Stores were different in those days. Cookies and crackers came loose in large cardboard boxes with a cardboard lid. The boxes were usually on the floor close to the counter. I used to put my hand in the box and grab as many cookies as I could and hand them to Bill Boyer who put them in a paper sack. He would wait while I grabbed another handful before he figured up how much I owed for the cookies. It was the same routine for crackers. You reached in the box and grabbed a handful of soda crackers and put them in a paper sack. You picked out as many cookies or crackers as you wanted and put them in a paper sack and handed it to Bill or Lillian who told you how much they cost.
When the cookies got web-worms in them, Mr. Boyer would tell me to have my mother come down and pick them up. Mother carried the box of wormy cookies home to feed to our chickens. They would be covered with worms and their spider-like webs. We would sit there and look in the box at the webs and turn the cookies over to see if any worm was on the bottom of each cookie. When we found a cookie with any worms on the bottom, it went straight into our mouths and we ate them. Our old chickens liked the worms as much as the cookies and they got most of the wormy ones.
You never "shopped" or looked around at different things. It was important not to waste time and there was a routine way of buying things you needed.
You walked in the store and you stood in front of the counter waiting on Bill or his wife, Lillian, to ask what you needed.
You could either hand them a list of items you needed, or tell them what you wanted. They would walk around the store and pick out the items and set them on the counter in front of you so you could see what they picked. If all the items were there then they would write it all down on a sales slip and tell you how much it cost.
You could either pay them in cash or tell them to "put it on the bill." If you had good credit with them they’d take the slip they just wrote out and put it in a file box with the rest of your bills. You were expected to pay it off on pay day or "pay something on it" when you could. Otherwise you might be "cut off" and get no more credit.
For those like my mother, who had no real cash income, both stores would take eggs in trade. Or they would take work in trade. Sometimes when the chickens were not laying eggs, mother would clean wallpaper for food. In good times, and we had eggs, and she sent me to the store with a note and a dozen, freshly washed eggs, to trade for the things she needed.