When I was a kid, I'd go to the grocery store with my Dad Saturday mornings. He never spent much time with me, so I guess it was one way to be around him. And yes, he did the shopping, not my Mom. A thing I recall is how fruits would be in season and available, like peaches, or you ate them frozen or canned. Strawberries I recall came frozen in these weird cardboard things. Peaches of course were, and are, canned, and not very tasty. Corn was like this of course, maybe we had lettuce all year?
My Dad wouldn't eat a whole host of dinners, so this was his way of controlling what my Mom cooked.
I would stop at a grocery near where we lived on the way home from work, buy whatever I was going to fix for dinner, and collect the kids at school (they had after school care). We ate a lot of spaghetti. I recall the Hunt's spaghetti sauce was 99 cents per, so I could make it pretty cheap even if I added ground beef and onion/celery/whatever. The funny thing was my daughter would always order spaghetti at Bob Evans. We kept them in business for a while. They had good kids' meals. I was all over discounted kids' meals, one adult and three kids.