Retirement is not on Oamaru grocer Brian Fraser’s radar.
"I’ve never thought about it," says the the 74-year-old, who has owned and operated the North Oamaru Four Square store with his wife Trish since 1979.
"Other guys, a number of them, had me on — if they’ve seen me out the front or come into the shop — ‘When are you going to retire, you silly bugger?’
"A lot of them, you know, not long after saying this — only bloody weeks, or months in some cases — they’re bloody dead.
"They’ve retired themselves.
"I know I’m not going to live forever, but we’re quite happy doing what we’re doing."
Mr Fraser says what keeps him and his wife happy at the grocery store is having "family all around us".
They see their six grandsons — aged 7 to 13 — most days, before and after school. Their son Wayne opens the store for the day’s trading each morning now, and his wife Lenore comes and picks their boys up after school.
Mr Fraser and his wife have lived in a three-bedroom apartment above the store on the Thames Highway since the day the then family of four took over the shop on August 4, 1979.
He has worked many of the nearly 14,000 days since, but the one that stands out most strongly remains the first one. It was a Sunday. His wife and daughter Nicky, who was 3 and a-half years old at the time, were standing at the top of the stairs as he walked down to open the shop for the very first time.
"I suppose I’ll always remember the day we started.
"I came down, stood on the landing there before the last few steps, and I looked up. Trish was holding Nicky’s hand and they were both crying. That does stick in my mind.
"I think it was probably all the excitement and pressure and that, taking over the shop."
He did not look back for too long.
"I came down and opened up."
Since then, in many ways, things are "still the same".
Customers’ clothes have changed, their hairstyles have changed, the cars they drive have changed but the customers themselves have not changed, he says.
"People buy what they wish to buy," Mr Fraser says.
"They buy what they want to buy and I wouldn’t go around telling them to buy this or to buy that. Or, we’ve got this, we’ve got that, you ought to try it. No, I wouldn’t do that."
Mr Fraser’s philosophy as a shopkeeper remains the same.
"Just be honest with people," he says.
"And if somebody wants something and we haven’t got it, we’ll, all endeavours, go and try and get it."
Before he and Trish bought the Four Square Mr Fraser worked at the Oamaru Foodstuffs branch for four years as a grocery buyer. It was a "cruisy" job, but he learned a lot and started to look around at opportunities in town.
"It was a position where you sort of had an inkling as to what was going on; who was doing what, what was happening — you sort of had an insight into it."
Day-to-day life at the store has changed a bit since the early years — Mr Fraser no longer uses "the pen and paper approach" to ordering.
He once would walk through the store with his order book or clipboard, and fill in what he wanted before taking his order down to the Oamaru Foodstuffs branch — now the site of the Whitestone Cheese cheese factory in Torridge St — and his order would be posted away twice a week.
The scanners he now uses behind the counter were introduced only seven years ago. He has barcodes and scanners for inventory work and computers for ordering.
"When we came here there was rolled ice cream — that was the thing of the day those days," he says.
"You’d roll your own ice cream into the cone. And milkshakes and all that."
And while the range of products the Frasers stock has changed and expanded, some "very loyal" customers have remained for up to "20-odd years".
There used to be a grocery store next door. It and another across the street had disappeared, and supermarkets had moved in nearby.
Back in the early years, there were 14 Four Squares in the area, but now there was only one in Weston.
The one in Hampden ceased operating as a Four Square for a period, reverting only recently. Only a few remained in the district.
He and his wife had survived some difficult times in the business and made some mistakes, he said. What got them through was "sheer hard work", offering a range of products and being open when people wanted to shop.
Five people now work in the shop — Mr Fraser, his wife Trish, son Wayne and "two [part-time] ladies, who have been with us for years".
"Every day is pretty much the same."
He still lives above the shop, but now that his son opens up in the morning he starts his day at 10.30am. However, he makes up for it at the other end of the day.
"I don’t get out of here till almost 11pm every night."
But he has no regrets — if he could do it all over again, he would, he says. He gets a different view of the world from behind the counter. He knows many the faces that appear in his store, but he sees a lot of strangers too.
"I get people come in who go ‘You’re still here?’," Mr Fraser says.
"I get people from out of town who call in when they’re going past."
And athough every day is mostly the same, something different always happens.
"There’s always a laugh around the corner."
