Anja Kajaala (née Järvinen) worked as a store manager at the Suopelto branch of Sysmä Osuuskauppa located in the premises of Ilola Inn in 1954–1965. She has many good memories of the place and the job of store manager was his dream job. Every customer was served well, with eye contact and a smile, it was an honor for Anja. In order to become a store manager, the guarantor had to make a deposit of 1,000 to 2,000 marks to the Cooperative Fund as a deposit for possible losses. If there was any loss or theft, the store manager covered it himself with his own money. Anja's father took care of the guarantee and that's how Anja got into her dream job.
All kinds of things were for sale, just like a general store in the olden days: in addition to food, tools, fertilizers, feed, fabrics and all kinds of other necessary things, e.g. kosan lights and candles as well as oil and gasoline. By ordering from Osuuskauppa, you also got rarer products. The sugar was in the form of sugar bowls and the butter in ten kilo pieces, from which the amount needed for the customer was cut. The old warehouse building in the yard served as a warehouse for sacks, tools, fodder and oil.
The work was sometimes physically demanding, because e.g. flour, salt and sugar came in fifty kilo sacks, which were difficult for a delicate woman to lift. Sometimes you got help from the men who came shopping, but most of the time you had to manage on your own. Wood heating, drinking water fetched from lake Päijänne year-round with a bucket, snow work with a plywood shovel and scrubbing the wooden floor by hand also contributed to the burden of the work.
Food sales were still affected by food stamps, a relic of the war times. The amounts of food and refreshments were strictly regulated, and the accounting of the products sold had to match the amounts on the cards. There were no mistakes, even if sometimes I felt like giving more. In the beginning, everything was counted by hand.
Osuuskauppa's customer base mainly consisted of permanent and summer residents of Suopelto. People usually came to summer vacation already in May, and it's not until September that it get quiet. Several notable people spent their summers in Suopelto. There were doctors, architects, managers, teachers and other well-known people, e.g. television's first weatherman Erkki Harjama was a regular customer of Osuuskauppa. The most impressive customer was Toivo Pylväläinen, a hermit from Koreakoivu, whom Anja describes as a wonderful, witty and trembling gentleman. Suopelto was like a small town. The first television came to Sulkala's boarding house on the opposite island, and almost the entire village gathered eagerly to watch it in the evenings.