WHAT IS A GROCER?

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2319, 23 August 1921, Page 1

WHAT IS A GROCER?

QUEER PROBLEM IN COURT,

English courts of law have been occupied recently with the question: What is a grocer?

No doubt every boy and girl thinks the answer to the question is easy, but the magistrates do not find it so. When some tradesmen at West Ham were summoned for failing to obey the Grocers’ and Provision Dealers’ Closing Order, they maintained that they were not grocers.

One woman had sold a packet of tea after eight o’clock, and declared that she was an oilman. This raised the further question whether oil could be legally sold after hours, and while the magistrate believed >hc might sell olive oil, the prosecuting solicitor doubted it. In any case, he said, it had never been decided whether paraffin could be sold after eight.

The magistrate (hen explained that though a grocer was originally a man who sold by the gross, the modern extension of the meaning of the word covered the kecjper of a general store. He therefore fined the tradesmen £1 each, and even a draper who had sold a packet of son]) after eight was held to be a grocer in the modern sense, and was fined £2.