MEAT SUPPLIES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26033, 22 December 1945, Page 6

MEAT SUPPLIES

BUTCHERS KEPT BUSY EXTRA ‘HELPERS NEEDED With the spectre of the long holiday menacing their Christmas preparations, harassed housewives made yesterday a busy day for the butchers. Strangely enough, when a Daily Times reporter looked in at two of the largest butchers’ shops in the city at lunch time and again in the early evening, they were comparatively empty, but the rush was on during the greater part of the day. Many of the shops took on extra helpers to cope with the volume of business, but even with the added hands the rush to buy meat for the next week kept the shops working at top pressure. Trade was as brisk in the suburbs, and one butcher adopted something approaching a self-help system, by which customers who had lodged early orders for meat supplies searched along rows of parcels arranged alphabetically on the floor until they located their own order. A few of the more fortunate housewives found their butchers still willing and able to deliver their orders to their respective homes, but for the majority it was a case of queue up and hope for the best. In its way, it afforded dwellers in a “ land of plenty ” an opportunity of realising the wearying experience of their cousins in Britain, where queueing-up has been the order for many years, with no certainty that there will be anything left to buy when one has reached the head of the queue. It is doubtful, however, whether many of Dunedin’s shoppers, their minds awhirl with belated but necessary Christmas buying of other types of goods, paused to give thanks that the purchasing of foodstuffs is not always the hectic scramble which it was yesterday.