When Manuel Xyrakis was just eight years old, he asked for a toy cash register for Christmas. His parents, Nick and Alice, obliged and allowed him to set it up at the lolly counter on Christmas Day at the front of their Ainslie store and told him he could keep any money he made that day.
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He made seven pounds and seven shillings. It was 1963 and the family had just bought the Paragon Supermarket/Milk Bar. Young Manuel dreamed of owning a shop as big as the Coles supermarket a few doors up along Edgar St, and soon the family was stocking a larger range of groceries and fruit and vegetables.
Now, 60 years later, the Ainslie IGA rivals - some would say supersedes - those larger chain supermarkets.
There's a deli section selling ready-made meals, salads, soups and dips, where everything is made on site. There's an in-house butchery where they make sausages and marinate legs of lamb and slice wagyu steak. The range of groceries is endless and they champion local producers such as Three Mills Bakery, Lonsdale Street Roasters and Ramen Daddy, among others. And we'll get back to the cheese wall.
But it's always been about more than what's stocked on the shelves. For the Xyrakis family, it's always been about community, and family; indeed, several times during our coffee at Edgar's Inn, where the first supermarket was built in 1948, Manuel refers to customers as family.
He talks about customers who first came in as young children who are now bringing in their own. During lockdown, they would hang on to toilet paper for elderly customers and deliver it with their few groceries. There are now a couple of second- and third-generation casual workers manning the checkouts.
Manuel and his younger sisters Irene and Yvonne remember their childhood centred around the Ainslie shops.
"We were always safe," says Yvonne.
"We'd ride our bikes around, go and play in the park, everyone kept an eye on us.
"I was only three when my parents bought the shop and when Manuel and Irene were at Ainslie Primary School I'd go and visit all the other shop-keepers during the day."
Nick Xyrakis was only 22 when he came from Greece in 1948. He worked for a while in a cafe in Newtown but grew tired of Sydney. One day in 1952 he walked into a train station and asked where the next train was headed, jumped aboard and ended up in Wagga. He bought a cafe, and in 1954 Alice joined him. It was an arranged marriage - they were from the same village of Pyles in Karpathos, Greece. The family moved to Albury, where the girls were born, and in 1960 they came to Canberra.
They bought a fruit shop on London Circuit, and when Coles opened in the new Monaro Mall in 1962 Nick was soon second in charge of the fruit and vegetable section.
In 1963, the Ainslie store was on offer.
"It was a tiny little place, not much bigger than where our deli is now," says Manuel.
They soon bought a ladies dress shop next door to expand, and in 1975 it became one of the foundation stories in the Shop-Rite Group. In 1976, they bought out the neighbouring Goodlands supermarket, expanding again. In 1988 it closed for three months for extensive renovations.
On May 31, 1993, almost 30 years to the day of the original purchase, it joined the IGA Supermarket group.
It hasn't always been smooth sailing. The business went into receivership in 1978. In partnership with another family they purchased supermarkets in Hawker, Kambah and Bateman's Bay and it was just all too much. They've been fighting with government planning authorities for years, trying to keep the whole Ainslie shopping precinct, of which they own a large portion, in excellent condition. They all admit they have days where they're wondering what they're doing, whether working in the same family-run business is a smart idea.
"I came here full-time straight after high school and I'd been working as a casual for four to five years before that," says Irene.
"One day, I was sitting in the office and it just all hit me. I wondered what on earth I was doing with my life.
"I had to post something, so I wandered upstairs, saying hi to other staff and customers on the way out. It was a beautiful day, crisp with blue skies and the trees in the park across the car park looked beautiful.
"I waved to a few people in the other shops and by the time I got to the post office I thought, I love this job, I wouldn't want to do anything else.
"Every time I drive here, even now, it feels like home."
Her sons Keith, Nicholas and Dimitri Mihailakis are the succession plan. Keith runs Ainslie Cellars next door with his wife Kate. When they moved the liquor section out of the main supermarket in 2012, they were told it would be a mistake.
Until they decided to fill the empty space with cheese. The "Great Cheese Wall of Ainslie" is almost worthy of its own store (now there's an idea, Manuel!) Initial talks with a South Australian cheese wholesaler resulted in $30,000 worth of cheese turning up for the first days of the wall opening.
"They told us just to trust them," says Manuel. "And they were right."
Now there's cheese from Australia and around the world, many with descriptions on them. If you ask nicely, you might get help with a cheese platter. There's a family joke about dating things BC - before cheese.
Patriarch Nick died in 1986. Manuel gets emotional when he talks about his father. He remembers seeing him crumble a few times when things were tough, but he remembers how determined he was.
"I'd just finished high school and was keen to party with my mates, and dad was sitting at the dinner table and started tapping hard on the table with his finger. He said if I wasn't going to go to university, I had to start work the next day. And that's literally what happened. I was there at 7am the next morning. I still can't hear someone tapping on anything without thinking about that night."
All three of her children suggest it was Alice who was the brains of the business. She was a school teacher by training and spoke five languages fluently, as well as ancient Greek and ancient Latin. She passed away in 2021, just shy of her 90th birthday and is sadly missed by her three children, nine grandchildren and 12 great grandchildren.
"When they were first thinking about buying Ainslie," Yvonne remembers, "Mum told dad that they could only do it if he did everything she said for the next two years.
"She put her foot down. They lived upstairs, she told him he couldn't be taking off to his soccer and things, and the rest is kind of history."
- Ainslie IGA will celebrate its 60th Birthday with a party in the park in front of the shops on May 20, from 10am until 3pm.