Days of Yore: Shopping

 "SA-PA-TOOOOOOS! SIYAY!" "BALUUUUUUT!"

These and more were a regular sound living in the Philippines. Street vendors pushed carts or carried their wares and shouted out what they were selling. If the musical Oliver! were reset in the Philippines, I imagine the above calls, along with others, would start out the song "Who Will Buy?" (For the record, the above calls translate to "Shoes! Shine!" and, well...I'll just say that balut is surprisingly delicious, considering how it looks and sounds when described. I think I'll go with "hard-boiled eggs on steroids." I would put a full description of it on a level with Scandinavian lutefisk, though the two dishes are nothing alike, aside from involving meat.)

Sari-Sari Store
Photo by Free2barredo
CC BY-SA 4.0 license

Then there were the sari-sari stores. They were neighborhood convenience stores, usually built into the ground floor of a family home. Our next-door neighbors at one house had one. They sold snacks and a bunch of other things. Many of them had fresh, steaming pandesal, or Philippine rolls topped with bread crumbs. Those are some of my favorite rolls in existence, right up there with Hawaiian rolls. Most sari-sari stores have a window where the customer asks the cashier for what they want, and then the cashier gets it and the customer pays for it. If they weren't next door, they were usually within walking distance.

Grocery stores in the Philippines were similar to the ones in the US, and some of my distaste for pop music was formed by the songs over the loudspeaker at grocery stores in the '80s... If I hear "Eternal Flame" by the Bangles (we changed the lyrics to "Do you feel insane?"), "Miss You Like Crazy" by Natalie Cole ("You're driving me craaazy!"), "Nothing's Gonna Change My Love for You" by George Benson, and others, one more time... Nothing against the talented singers, but I got sick of those songs that I heard over and over in the grocery stores. And now I have those songs going through my head. I have nobody to blame but myself.

They had markets where they sold produce, meat, and other things. Those markets smelled fishy. There were markets where you could buy souvenirs. We had sukis, or vendors that we would visit regularly when we needed the specific wares they sold, and we would get to know them. They often gave us great discounts as we became friends. Bargaining is an art form in the Philippines, and it was a unit in Tagalog class in school. We generally started the bargaining in English, and they would come down a bit, but they would only go so far when speaking English. Then we would switch to Tagalog. They were often surprised, and more willing to bargain further. 

National Bookstore was a large chain in the Philippines, and one of my favorite places to go, as reading filled up most of my spare time when I wasn't grounded from reading. 😀 We had a shopping mall called Greenhills where we often went. They also had some great restaurants. As malls got more popular, Robinson's opened all over the place. It's a chain of malls, like Carrefour in France and elsewhere. (In fact, I recently found out that Tum Nak Thai, the restaurant we visited in Bangkok and the largest restaurant in the world at the time, is gone, and they now have a Carrefour and a Robinson's in its place. One single restaurant was replaced by two malls.) I remember Robinson's Galleria in Manila. I have heard that they have continued to open more and larger malls in the Philippines since we left in 1991.

Coming to the US, we found grocery stores were similar. Safeway, Albertson's, Fred Meyer and QFC were everywhere in the Seattle area. (Fred Meyer and QFC are currently owned by Kroger. When I visited Utah last year, I went to Smith's, which I had never heard of, and they honored my Fred Meyer rewards card because they are also owned by Kroger.) Albertson's is now owned by Safeway, so many of the Albertson's in the area have converted to Safeway. There a few Wal-marts in the area.

There were video stores all over the place. Blockbuster was one of the largest chains. When DVDs replaced VHS, they adapted. Eventually, with Netflix and others, they were unable to compete and have mostly closed. There is only one Blockbuster left, in Oregon. Many grocery stores and electronics stores (such as Best Buy), and some surviving bookstores such as Barnes & Noble, still sell DVDs and Blu-Rays.

We had multiple malls in the Seattle area. Alderwood Mall in Lynnwood and Bell Square in Bellevue were huge. Northgate Mall in North Seattle was smaller, and was the oldest shopping mall in the US. Everett Mall in Everett was somewhere around the same size as Northgate. My grandparents used to walk there all the time. Totem Lake Mall in Kirkland was one of the smallest malls I've been to. There were others around as well. Of those, Totem Lake Mall was the first to close. For a long time, there was only one store left in the mall, and it was sad walking down the dark hallways with almost all the stores closed and nobody there. When the movie Warm Bodies came out (which involves zombies, for those who haven't seen it...basically Romeo & Juliet in reverse), I thought that mall would be a perfect place to film a sequel. It's gone now, with new developments in its place. More recently, Northgate Mall is mostly gone, replaced by a hockey rink and transit station. Last I knew, there were a few stores left, but it isn't really a mall any more. The other malls listed above are still there, but they have undergone a lot of changes over the years.

As the internet got more popular, I made more friends around the world. I was surprised to hear my friends in the Southeastern US talking about shopping buggies, as they are clearly called shopping carts. They have carts in the Philippines. They have carts in the Northwest US. They have carts in the Midwest and Southwest. They are called carts just about everywhere I had been. I had no idea people in other English-speaking regions called them something different! (Granted, they are called trolleys in the UK, if I remember right.) I always associated buggies with horse-drawn carriages.

There were several bookstore chains, such as Barnes & Noble, Borders, Waldenbooks and others. Waldenbooks and Borders have since closed. With Kindle and other electronic means of reading and listening to books, as well as the convenience of ordering online, the demand for brick-and-mortar bookstores has decreased considerably. (I had forgotten about Waldenbooks until I watched Stranger Things recently, streaming on Netflix.)

Online merchants got more common. Amazon has been one of the largest and most enduring. There are also others, such as eBay.

Speaking of online merchants, guess what? I don't do most of my shopping at the brick-and-mortar stores any more! I do shop at them sometimes, but lately I've increasingly used...I hope you're sitting down for this...my cell phone! Many things are much more convenient to order on Amazon and other online merchants. Since COVID, I've done a lot of my grocery shopping on the Instacart app and had it delivered. I am finding more and more that shopping on Instacart also helps me to avoid the annoying habit of groceries I didn't need "magically" jumping into my cart off the shelf and making me spend money I didn't need to spend. I can blame the groceries in question because they are inanimate and can't defend themselves. 

Many stores have pickup options, which we have also used. You order and pay on the app, then drive to the store, and someone brings the groceries out to your car. (They have a part of the parking lot dedicated to this option, and you can tell them on the app which parking spot you are using.)

Shopping has changed a lot over the years. I can't speak for the Philippines, as I was last there in the '90s, but I have heard there have been a lot of changes there too. As far as I know, they still have sari-sari stores and malls and all the other stores mentioned above (at least, those mentioned in the part about the Philippines).

Days of Yore: Going Postal

The days of the Pony Express, delivering mail by stagecoach, and the Wells Fargo Wagon were a good deal before my time. Even so, mail delivery has changed a lot in my lifetime.

Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash

When I was young, especially living in the Philippines and having family and friends in the US, mail was a lot slower than it is today. People mailing Christmas gifts to us had to mail it a couple months early if they wanted it to reach us on time. Consequently, we would often get Christmas gifts in January or February, or sometimes even later.

We sent letters in several ways:

• We would fold up the letter and place it in an envelope, licking the seal shut (which very rarely tasted good) and licking the stamps (again, not very delicious) to stick them to the envelope. We addressed the envelope.
• There were special envelopes that doubled as letters. We would write the letter on one side, then fold along the dotted lines, and fold special flaps over the top and sides and lick the seals shut. Then we would add stamps and address the side that was facing out. That saved paper.
• Postcards had a photo on one side and space for a short note, the address, and the stamp on the other side. You had to keep in mind that the note was visible for anyone to see, so best not to include information you didn't want the world to know.

We could also send packages, which typically required more postage. We would either put the item to send in a box and address the box, or wrap the item (or box) in paper and address that.

When ordering things by mail, we would fill out the order form that we got in the mail or in a magazine or by other means, and then mail it in. Sometimes that involved saving labels from cereal boxes to get the special prize that would be delivered sometime later. We had to wait for the order form to reach the place we were ordering from, and then for them to send the item that we ordered. When I was in the US in 3rd grade and 8th-12th grade, we got quarterly order sheets from Scholastic Book Club distributed at school, and we could order books. I loved getting those, as I enjoyed reading any chance I got. (One time in 8th grade I ordered a Where's Waldo? book which never arrived. I kept asking my teacher, "Where's Waldo?" when I wanted to check on the status. I never did get it. I don't recall if I got a refund. Most orders arrived fine, but that was an ironic one not to arrive.)

I attended 3rd grade in the US. I made new friends that year, and I was surprised after returning to the Philippines to receive a letter from Chris, one of my classmates in 3rd grade, and we became pen pals, regularly writing back and forth. Avis, another friend from 3rd grade, also became a pen pal when I was in the Philippines. She had Native American heritage, and she once sent me a dream catcher. I didn't know the significance of it at the time, but I thought it was very cool with the feather and everything. In high school in the US, our teacher was involved in a program to set up pen pals between France and the US. I signed up and was assigned a teen in Saint-Malo named Aurélien. He and I exchanged letters well after I graduated from high school. We shared about our respective cultures and other things. I practiced my French and he practiced his English. (I actually learned the English word "erudite" from him... I had to look it up when he used it in a letter to me! I'm sure he looked up the word érudit in his French-English dictionary and used the most similar translation.) When I studied in France in 1999, I was able to talk to him by phone, and I even visited Saint-Malo, but we unfortunately missed each other.

I got my first "electronic mail" (e-mail) address in high school (or it might have been 8th grade). That was exciting, especially since it was a brand new form of communication, and it was one way of "getting on the information superhighway." My first e-mail was with Juno.com. I would eventually stop using it due to excessive spam that far outnumbered the legitimate e-mails. (I also had an e-mail on my own domain, stevensauke.com, which I eventually deleted for the same reason.) I would get Hotmail later, and when Gmail was introduced, I got an e-mail with them when it was by invitation only. I also had e-mail addresses on my school's domain starting in high school, as well as a few others over the years.

E-mail sped up the ordering process. We still had to wait some time for the item to arrive, but we didn't have to wait for the order to reach the company. With the advent of online merchants, such as Amazon, it was even faster. Now (depending on what and where I'm ordering), I can sometimes order something and receive it the next day, or occasionally even the same day! Also, some things can now be downloaded rather than mailed. When writing a letter by e-mail, depending on how much the other person checks their e-mail, we can get a response within moments rather than months.

We have always received junk mail in the mailbox and spam in our inbox. Spam filters have come a long way and are now a lot better at filtering them out, but we still have to be careful, and we also have to check the spam folder from time to time in the event a legit e-mail was mistakenly filtered there.

Of course, no "Days of Yore" post would be complete without me pointing out that I do most of this now on my cell phone. My grandpa was amazed with how much I could do on my telephone! (I actually wrote his eulogy on my phone, read it from my phone, and designed the front of the program for his memorial on my phone because of our regular discussions about this. After the fact, I realized I should have mentioned that when sharing at the memorial.)