When Carrie Hawkins set up a grocery stand in upstate New York in the middle of the Great Depression, she regularly extended scarce credit to her unemployed customers. She figured that helping them to put food on the table would also be good for sales in the long term.

Seventy-five years later, as customers once again face hard economic times, it is the turn of her great-grandson, Gary Hawkins, to try to entice the unemployed to the large supermarket he now manages. “We looked back at our history and decided that this was an idea whose time had come again,” he explains.