The Lost Art of Grocery Store Dishes

I remember Melmac.

Not the fictional planet from ALF, though I remember that too. No, I mean the dishes. The brightly colored, virtually indestructible everyday dishware that quietly helped parents survive young children for decades.

If you are of a certain age, you probably remember them. If not, imagine dishes specifically designed to withstand childhood.

Not careful childhood, either. Actual childhood. The kind involving sticky hands, poor judgment, and children suddenly remembering something urgent halfway across the room while still carrying a full plate.

As I’ve mentioned before, I am the eldest of fourteen children.

Fourteen.

At any given point, there were always several small people in our house operating with wildly different levels of coordination. Some walked confidently. Some did not. Some appeared to regard gravity as an interesting theory worth testing repeatedly.

If there is one thing mothers of young children know, it’s this: you do not hand a toddler fine china if you want your heart to continue beating in a normal rhythm. One dropped plate and suddenly you can hear your blood pressure pounding in your ears.

This is where Melmac came in.

That stuff could survive practically anything. Dropped? Fine. Knocked off the table? Fine. Used in ways dishes were never intended to be used? Also fine.

I’m not saying children deliberately destroy things, but they do seem to possess a natural talent for turning ordinary household objects into accidental experiments.

Melmac held up beautifully.

It came in cheerful colors and patterns—turquoise, yellow, pink, avocado green, flowers, geometric shapes. It looked happy. Kitchens felt happy then, too, though maybe that’s nostalgia talking.

And yes, if you put it in the dishwasher often enough, the color faded a bit. Nobody cared. These were not precious dishes. Nobody whispered nervously while setting the table. They were everyday dishes. Their entire purpose in life was to hold food and survive children.

Honestly, they deserved medals.

I also remember one of the great grocery store promotions of my childhood. Our local grocery store had a deal. Spend a certain amount on groceries and receive four plates, bowls, or bread plates. Now, for a family with two children, this was probably a nice little bonus. For a family with fourteen children, this was practically an acquisition strategy.

We shopped there constantly, and with that many mouths to feed we qualified every single trip. Over time, we somehow ended up with two or three sets of everything. Which was probably wise. In a house that full, dishes weren’t really dishes. They were infrastructure.

There were meals, snacks, second helpings, friends who stayed for dinner, teenagers who ate as if preparing for a harsh winter, and younger children who managed to dirty six cups before noon. You needed extras. Then extras for your extras. And somehow it all worked.

What strikes me now is how practical those grocery store promotions were. Today you spend a small fortune and earn digital points that may eventually transform into twelve cents off yogurt if you correctly activate seventeen coupons on an app and the moon is in the proper phase.

Back then? You got bowls. Real bowls. Bowls that sat in your cupboard for years and quietly did their jobs.

I honestly miss things like that.

Maybe stores still offer promotions like this somewhere, but I haven’t seen one in ages. Everything now feels temporary or digital or strangely complicated. Nobody’s rewarding grocery shopping with dishes sturdy enough to survive an entire generation of children.

And maybe that’s a shame. Because Melmac understood something important: Family life is messy. Sometimes things get dropped. And sometimes the best things in a house are the ones sturdy enough to survive being loved hard.