The Village Shop

    The village shop is a general store much like the good old fashioned corner shop, but sadly few exist today. A shop that sold everything from flowers to saucepans, bread, eggs brussel sprouts, potatoes, milk. Tinned goods, sweets, household goods, brooms, carpet beaters, ladles and plastic laundry baskets. as well as special imports of blue and white Cornish ware pottery, and as it happens Portmeirion pottery their Penny Plain pattern. Oranges, tomatoes, pineapples, to provide a full list would be almost endless. Now the village shop is a reflection of a past world, of paper bags and food items wrapped in greaseproof paper by the shopkeeper and not plastic. 

    And yet by the time of ‘Hammer Into Anvil’ something else “olde worlde” has been added to the village shop, an old fashioned cash register! These date from the 1940’s.

   A large cash drawer with scooped change compartments, and a spring clamps for notes. It has a bell which ‘dings’ every time the cash register is opened. The measurements of the cash registers are around 7.5" high, 9.5" wide, and 18.5" front to back. These cash registers were fitted with a receipt roll, the only thing is each purchase had to be hand written on the receipt as it was dispensed.
   The question is, why in a cashless society as the village, did the new shopkeeper-No.112, feel the need to have an old fashioned cash register? Perhaps he thought it added a little more ambiance to the olde worlde atmosphere of the village shop. And yet he had to put the clippings from credit cards into something, as they were proofs of sales.

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