The story mentions one employee's recollection of Bunce's in "the olde worlde" times – when "there was no packaging and everything was loose". Ah, those were the days!

It takes me back to my after-school job with the local Co-op, when being loose was a way of life (if you know what I mean).

Biscuits, currants, sweets... all were weighed out from large, behind-the-counter tins or bags and customers were able to buy as much, or as little, as needed.

We even wrapped up smaller portions of food like butter and sugar for people who didn't want, or couldn't afford, too much at any one time. Service indeed.

Forward to 2008, and it's no longer so easy to buy some foods in limited quantities, or a very limited number of nails or screws for a one-off job.

Enter the ubiquitous plastic and cardboard containers, which can defy a bank robber's attempts to get at what's inside.

I get very frustrated at times, and I'm no weakling.

What an ordeal it is for the elderly and less-able among us to penetrate those enticingly-transparent shields, unstick those fiendishly-glued seals on soup cartons, or peel off the tight silver disc beneath the screw caps of plastic milk containers.

I know there's a big debate on the need to save costs and customers' sanity by cutting down packaging, and helping to save the planet at the same time. But suppliers still have a long way to go in this direction.

Why, for example, do we have to break through two layers of tough cardboard to reach Twinings' peppermint tea bags?

And when I buy a sealed box of cherry tomatoes, it's just my luck that there are couple of rotten ones hidden at the bottom.

It didn't happen when I picked my own out of a large box.

Of course, it's all our own fault.

The advent of the supermarket lured us away from smaller shops which might be more inclined to provide a more personal service as far as quantities go.

And the health and safety brigade found it only too easy to convince our councils (and us) that it wasn't quite the thing any more for sides of beef and pork to be hung up outside the front of a busy high street shop, polluted by flies and dust, et al, or for milk to be ladled out of a churn.

All that went the way of those communal water drinking spouts in school playgrounds and public parks.

I wonder now, however, if those water spouts weren't any more harmful to children's health than the high-additive, teeth-rotting canned drinks which are the flavour-of-the-street nowadays.

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