1958: Otara Foodtown
June 18, 2025
By AHNZ
Today in history, 18 June, 1958, New Zealand’s first supermarket: Otara Foodtown. A revolutionary change from the more personal and family-orientated village shopping culture that came before.
Transmission of food is an essential, functional, part of supplying the firms and households that make up New Zealand’s corporate organism. It’s not just energy because the most basic products can do that. Everything above the bare budget brands is imbued with extra meaning. When you pay for more than the simple version of anything in a shop you are paying for identity. What does this kind of bread say about me? Who am I in this or that hat? What group am I saying I’m in with these shoes? Is this cool? Is this professional? Is this motherly? Who smokes this brand of cigarettes?
When you buy a particular drink it’s not just for thirst. Could have stayed home and hydrated from tap water if that were all. What you buy is situated in an identity space to be seen by others and consumed with them as your witness so they will have the ideas about you that you want them to. Most New Zealanders participate in this form of consumerism and push it to the limits of what their income can support if not beyond.
Before the supermarket these primate dominance hierarchy games were played for generations between the various village shops. Grocers, butchers, bakers, fishmongers, cobblers apothecaries, confectioners, tobacconists, florists, etc. It is such an arrangement as this that created the nucleus of any of our town centers and made for a rich and purposeful community of, mostly housewives, buzzing about the various vendors. This, of course, created a strong and textured community life because the act of shopping and running errands put people together regularly who networked and socialised and planned and organised their towns and the lives of their families.
Otara Foodtown was the first of many supermarkets that broke out around New Zealand and swept that old life away. The pre-war generations would have been largely appalled at this cultural genocide of our way of life. They would have foreseen the loss of the old fabric and the hollowing out of main street. Witnessing Otara Foodtown opening up would have vindicated them as shoppers crushed in, trampling and breaking, fainting and jamming their way in like uncouth barbarians upon Rome. The old code of conduct of New Zealand civilisation was dying out with them.
To these Kiwi generations the supermarket and ‘big box store’ resembled a wholesale warehouse not a retail environment. The idea of pushing a trolly and picking your own orders from racking is essentially being an unpaid worker in someone else’s shop but the supermarket has made this normal. When Stephen Tindall created The Warehouse (1982) he gave it the appropriate name.
The old Kiwi Town way of life was killed off by this estranging change. Mind you, all those various specialty shops killed by the massive K-Mart, Costco, Warehouse models were themselves once the disruptor. They killed the general store of the 1800s and now the general store was back in a new form.
“We had family friends who lived next door to the site. There was formerly a boarding kennels on the site and we watched this being demolished and the supermarket built.” – Robert Winchester
“They introduced shopping trolleys to NZ but people were reluctant to use them so they did a special on single toilet rolls.people couldn’t carry them so had to use a trolley.”- Ivan Gillatt
“Specialist departments died out. Specific green grocer and butchers and bakeries and fishmongers, once common specialities in every New Zealand town, withered. The new supermarkets were self-service: Customers just walk isles and tracks loading into a wheeled trolly. Shopping became an unromantic and un-communal drive-through business rather than part of our social fabric.” – 1970s: The Fall of Four Square Stores, AHNZ
“The ‘Otara Foodtown’ supermarket is opened on the Great South Road to the south of Otahuhu, Sometimes known as the Otahuhu supermarket, this is New Zealand’s first supermarket. The nascent Foodtown chain’s second supermarket is built at Takanini in 1961; thereafter Foodtown expands greatly.,” – Manukau’s Journey, Auckland Libraries
“Women shoppers trampled foodstuffs, broke shop fittings and jammed doorways when a new supermarket food store opened yesterday morning at Otara … Two women fainted in the crush. Police closed the shop at 12.15 p.m. and many shoppers were turned away … The store was reopened at 2.30 p.m. and shoppers were admitted in relays “. At the height of the morning rush customers’ cars filled 120 parking lots outside the store and disrupted traffic on the Great South Road ..”, – Otara Battle for Bargains: Opening-Day Rush, NZ Herald (19/6/1958)
“Yes I remember when. Back then we had a sense of decency and respect for ourselves and others. Even though we set good standards we still ruined our country because modern youth keeps telling us that.” – Lance Corcoran to AHNZ (2019)
Before this great change people used to dress well for their shopping experience. Indeed, they were still doing so when air travel became part of daily life.
After the change there was no need for that. In the 2010s and beyond people will go shopping with so little thought that it’s not unusual in the big cities to see people at the supermarket dressed in their pajamas. The Pyjama People belong to a different culture. It’s always been with us. But currently they are the mainstream and are out and proud.
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Image ref. Elizabeth Phyllis Andrews. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections. Colour by Graeme Todd. AHNZ enhanced (2025)
Image ref. Credit: National Publicity Studios Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library. AHNZ enhanced (2025)
Ref Auckland Research Centres, Facebook (2022)
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