Daily Photo – The Classic 1960s Kiwi Dairy.
The good old 1960s beachside Kiwi dairy. You could walk in with a crisp $1 note from your parents and purchase both a single-scoop ice cream and a hot mince pie for 10 cents each. You could add a Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate bar for 5 cents, while a large raspberry milkshake whipped up in a metal tin would cost 15 cents. A scoop of hot chips wrapped tightly in newspaper would be another 10 cents, a standard loaf of Tip Top bread for making chip sandwiches would set you back a further 11 cents, and a packet of 20 Rothmans for the parents would cost 33 cents, bringing your total bill to 94 cents. You could still walk out with 6 cents of loose change in your pocket, provided you didn’t spend it on lollies.
The Kiwi beachside dairy served as the ultimate hub of the New Zealand summer. Following the chaotic transition to decimal currency in 1967, dairy counters became battlegrounds as fierce, sunburnt 10-year-olds aggressively argued the mathematical fairness of their lolly conversions with confused shopkeepers. This chaos was matched outdoors by the legendary “hot asphalt dash”, a frantic, high-kicking sprint across melting tarmac by barefoot kids desperate to reach the cool refuge of the shop’s chequered linoleum floor. Then there was the chest freezer, where children attempted to hide stolen frozen treats down their woollen swimming togs, only to be instantly given away when the ice pressed against their skin. Finally, nothing tested an owner’s patience quite like the agonisingly slow lolly selection, which saw sandy-fingered children spending twenty minutes debating how to spend a single 5-cent coin while an increasingly frustrated queue waited behind them.
Curious for more? Explore more from a Small City.
