We were in West Side Stores, which had formerly been a supermarket called Crazy Prices. When I think about the evolution of Derry, I’m less likely to think of things like border checkpoints and armoured cars – both of which saw a precipitous drop in numbers during my childhood – and apt to recall places like Crazy Prices, and the shop that went there after, before it became the Quayside Tesco that stands there to this day. Crazy Prices, as its name suggests, was a shop whose branding might seem slightly, or perhaps wildly, insensitive nowadays. Its titular conceit was that the store’s contents were so bafflingly discounted, so preposterously inexpensive, that they raised very real questions about the mental health of the proprietors. Their staff, and possibly their customers, were also implicated in this contagion of madness, branded throughout their locations with bulging eyes and outstretched tongues.
These prices, they implied, were so dribblesomely inscrutable that even to glance in their direction posed a very real risk of derangement. These prices weren’t merely cheap, you understand, they were crazy, and any attempt to comprehend them was as pointless as considering the chasmic, gnawing depth of infinity itself. ‘You must understand,’ their day-glo ads seemed to say, ‘if you step inside, you may never recover from these prices.’ In every aisle, alongside shoulder joints for less than a pound and earthenware cooking sets for a fiver or less, it was heavily suggested you’d find people fitting and foaming at the mouth from the value of it all. To step into the produce aisle was to take your life in your hands, since you were as likely to see ten-penny apples as you were to find a random fellow customer, driven hopelessly demented by the discounts on offer, avidly shitting himself as he rolled around the floor. These were not Unreasonable Prices. Questionable Prices were not what this place was about. This was Crazy Prices, motherfucker. Grab a basket, a nappy and a straitjacket, and may God have mercy on your soul.
But this was as nothing compared to what came next. After Crazy Prices merged with Stewart’s, another locally owned supermarket chain, it became West Side Stores. The name fascinated me throughout its tenure on the Strand Road, since it was never clear why it was called West Side Stores. It was known that the merger necessitated a fresh start with a new brand identity, one that didn’t favour either the Stewart’s or the Crazy Prices fraternity. One presumes Stewart’s, who seemed as though they had a bit more sense about them, rejected portmanteaus like Batshit Stewart’s or Big Stew’s Mentally Ill Bargain Bin out of hand.
Whatever the case, they landed on West Side Stores, perhaps because this first store was on the western side of the city. Or maybe their numerous locations outside of Derry were all in the western part of Northern Ireland. The exact meaning was opaque, but the supermarket further muddled things by leaning into the west part of that name, specifically by branding each of its stores with the tropes of the American west. Everything was western-themed, from Westside Sam, their giant cowboy mascot, to the famed Cowboy Supper meal that became a local delicacy. Produce was laid out around the stores on prop barrels, and staff names were displayed on little sheriff’s badges. Deals were presented with names like the ‘Back to School Saddlebag Special’ or the ‘Honest Injun Health & Beauty Hoedown’.
It’s odd to think that there must have been sober meetings about all these bizarre marketing decisions, but in any case it worked, since this baffling combination of discount retail and cowboy puns was such a hit that the store remained in Derry for five or six years. Such was its cultural impact, Tesco retained the Cowboy Supper there, and there alone, for many years afterwards. But what irked me most of all was that even if one presumed that the western branding was a vote-winner in nineties Northern Ireland, it still didn’t make sense. West Side Stores, as I pointed out to my dad on several occasions, was clearly a pun on West Side Story, meaning the appropriate terrible exercise in branding that they should have gone for was that of mid-century New York, Manhattan gang wars and musical theatre.
Not that these feelings of righteous indignation were much consolation as I experienced just one of those many small-scale ego deaths that define a teenaged life.
‘Now, are you going to honour the deal or not?’ my father continued doggedly at the Stetson-wearing teenager who glowered across the counter.
This scenario would have been embarrassing enough, but the shopping in question, the trolley load holding up today’s order of business, was a Yee Haw What’s Wrong with Your Bowels, Pardner? hyper-multipack of toilet rolls. Plain white non-quilted toilet rolls, and in a quantity that was, as always when we bought anything in these kinds of shops, not just large but alarming. Buying toilet roll is uncomfortable at the best of times. There is always that fear, silly but present nonetheless, that my server will glance disgustedly at the paper I’m purchasing and give a look like they plan to pin my photo to a noticeboard in a back room somewhere, lining up profiles of all the disgusting people who live locally and still do shits. So standing beside a trolley that bore a precarious tower of toilet roll, so tall it dwarfed my father, myself and the steadily growing line of discontented fellow shoppers behind us, was worse still. I could feel my heart drying out and curling up inside my chest. As my father continued his dissertation on why he should be spared a two-pound surcharge for the six thousand toilet rolls he was buying, the cheapest such product available at that time outside of the former Soviet Union, I could picture in every corner of the shop an endless line of boys who were more popular, or girls I fancied, turning to see me standing there, the puny, acne-ridden progeny of this incontinent Scrooge.
Beep. The cashier rang the items through at the price my father had suggested, and he motioned for me to get them ready for transportation. She had blinked, and to anyone there who didn’t know us, we must have seemed like a father-and-son team of hucksters, the kind who would have been seen pushing a cart filled with scrap through dustbowl-era Kansas but who, in Derry, were reduced to selling their ill-gotten gains on the lucrative black market for discount toilet paper.
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These kinds of experiences were a staple of my childhood, and fixed for me the image of my father as a miser, particularly when he would later instruct us on the usage of that very shipment of toilet paper. It was his contention, argued many times and at least once at the dinner table, that one sheet, judiciously used, was sufficient for most movements – I believe he even mimed specific foldings that could be employed in helping us achieve this feat. So, to some extent, this reputation was earned. He also never bought branded cereals or snacks; we feasted instead on those supermarket variants that were almost but not quite like the target brand. ‘Wow,’ we’d say, in between diffident bites of our Puffin bars, ‘Tesco must have really good lawyers.’ But this perception of him was massively unfair, since he worked extremely hard and earned a good wage by Derry standards, and spent all of it trying to manage an unreasonably large household. It’s striking how little I understood this at the time, which was a direct consequence of all the measures he took to make sure we never felt poorer than anyone else.