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a puttering kind of store
It is true that there are people in America who really prefer to do business at a puttering kind of a store no matter how much time it costs them. They take naturally to a cash and carry store or to a store that lovingly saves one forty cents’ worth of money by taking four dollars’ worth of one’s time.
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Gerald Stanley Lee ranting about the post office, in “Loco-Mindedness,” chapter 19 in his The Ghost in the White House : Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the White House) can make themselves felt with a president — How they can back him up — Express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they want. (New York, 1920) : 130 (link)
same (one of four scans via hathitrust)