Suburban transport hubs prompted the clustering of shops in small strip shopping centres. Most suburbs had grocery stores selling a wide range of goods. Shoppers walked or rode to the store, where sales assistants advised them on purchases or fetched items from shelves behind the counter, where food items were weighted and wrapped.

The rise of the first ‘cash and carry’ supermarkets in the inter-war years saw the demise of corner shops and strip shopping centres. By refusing credit and lowering labour costs, grocery chains such as Moran & Cato forced out smaller grocers who found chain store pricing hard to beat. Fully self-service supermarkets did not become popular in Australia until the 1960s.

The modern supermarket offers a cornucopia of pre-packaged products set within a highly stylised and organised shopping space where all one’s food requirements can be purchased in the one place, at one time and on one level, thus saving energy and time.