My parents had their little supermarket prepared for anything the 1970s could throw at it: a generator, storm lanterns and crank-handle tills for interruptions to the power supply; and a store four times the size of the shop for interruptions to the food supply. They crammed it with months-worth of stock.
That store above all would be the historic curiosity today.
I still marvel at glimpses through the back door of modern supermarkets, where you can often see straight onto the loading bay, with room for one day’s deliveries at most.
People are starting to ask how this ‘just-in-time’ system can cope with everything Brexit will throw at it - the government accepts, for example, that every additional minute taken to check each lorry at Dover will add ten miles to the motorway queue in Kent.
Brexit becoming 'stuff of nightmares' warns food industry boss
Promises of “adequate food” have been made, advice to stockpile was considered then withdrawn as too alarming, and contingency preparations are apparently under way. The experience of the 1970s has been cited, as has the ‘Blitz spirit’ of the Second World War.
What is perhaps still not appreciated is how physically robust the 1970s system was, yet how psychologically vulnerable it remained.
For a start, every shop aimed to have a large, well-stocked store. It was an unquestioned part of retail culture and far from being seen as a costly inefficiency, high inflation made it better than money in the bank.
There were vastly more independent shops and small chains than there are today, spreading risk and stock around, and they were supplied by intermediaries - wholesalers, distributors and shippers - each with stores of their own.
Most of this has since vanished, replaced by four mega-chains that whisk nearly everything from farm and factory to shelf.
In the 1970s, shops would often respond to shortages by restricting sales per customer, then be scolded by press and public for ‘introducing rationing’.
Yet this was only possible because there was stored stock to ration. Today, everything would run out in hours.
Interruptions to the food supply were real in the 1970s and Northern Ireland was especially vulnerable - ferries were part of nationalised British Rail, the haulage industry was heavily unionised and secondary picketing was legal, so strikes anywhere in the UK could halt shipments across the Irish Sea.
But there was no period when the population was in danger of much more than inconvenience, let alone starvation.
The worst aspect of supply interruptions was the panic buying and hoarding they provoked, making items needlessly unavailable or difficult to obtain, sometimes long after normal deliveries had resumed.
Invoking the Blitz spirit over this is priceless - I remember the wartime generation as 1970s shoppers and they were the sharpest shelf-clearers of the lot.
All attempts to cope with shortages were overwhelmed by the psychology of scarcity, creating self-fulfilling prophesies that could be sparked off by as little as a rumour.
The oil crisis, the winter of discontent and, in Northern Ireland, the Ulster Workers Council strike are remembered as defining episodes of 1970s dysfunction but it was the 1974 sugar crisis that caused people to lose faith in the food supply.
A complex problem that year with diverted Commonwealth imports and EEC restrictions on domestic production led the government to warn the UK could run low on sugar.
Pandemonium ensued and for six months ‘white gold’ became a precious commodity - bags of it were raffled as prizes. Outbreaks of panic buying were reported as late as 1976. However, the warning had been overstated and actual supplies were largely unaffected - the whole thing had been mass hysteria. Nevertheless, a general consumer jumpiness lasted the rest of the decade, all due to a misunderstanding over one basic commodity.
The potential for Brexit to replicate these problems is obvious and the modern world seems designed to amplify them - consider what social media will do for spreading rumours.
As the son of 1970s grocers, my feelings on this are mixed. I believe we are at risk of a much bigger shock than is realised, yet I struggle to take it seriously. There is still no danger of people going hungry - only of a passing disruption to our consumer paradise.
But of course, my family never ran low on food - we had a store full of it - and tales of customers fighting over the last item on the shelf were our teatime entertainment.
I may not find the Blitz spirit so amusing next time around.
