Where did people go shopping during the war?

Answer 1

There were no malls, and in the entire US only the first handful of grocery supermarkets. Most people shopped for food at a neighborhood market, usually a mom and pop operation. Some people went to bakeries for bread and a butcher shop for meat, but these items were usually available in most corner stores. The milkman came around in the early morning hours and left glass quart milk bottles outside peoples doors, and collected every week or two. Shopping for clothes and household goods was done in the downtown business district, mostly in department stores, which had not yet moved to malls, because there were no malls. Woolworths was a popular store, J. C. Penney was downtown, so was Kress (which has morphed into K-Mart), and Sears was probably the nation's biggest retailer. Sears had stores in the downtown of larger cities, and "catalog showrooms" in smaller county seat towns, where shoppers could go in and order items from the Sears catalog. Isolated rural families did almost all their shopping from the Sears and Montgomery-Ward catalogs. Wal-mart was only a dream of Sam Walton.