He was just 15, a bit brazen and a bit of an opportunist when he rocked up to a job interview in a t-shirt and shorts riding a skateboard.

It was Bruce Goulding's uniform and it was the day, 30 years ago, that Woolworths opened its superstore at Bayfair – the first business on the block.

Terry Tocker standing where it all began for him three decades ago.

Bruce didn't know what job he wanted. He just wanted a job.

Back then, in 1984, it was a time when the supermarkets stayed closed on God's day, there were only five digits in a phone number and Woolworths courted customers by accepting payment by cheque.

Bruce made an impression on Woolworth's manager of the day Terry Tocker. Terry liked Bruce's cut and liked his cheek.

'He presented well so I gave him a job,” says Terry. Trolley boy on the award rate of $9 an hour.

But only for a time, because this brash kid had a flair for business and especially bags of groceries. He became a manager, then a buying manager.

This was one of the ‘lovely stories' of Terry's 50 years in the industry.

The arrival of Terry and the ‘superstore' meant a major injection of jobs and money into a suburb at a time when there were few and little.

'There were long queues for about 150 jobs, and many more applicants than jobs available,” he explains. 'The interviews took about three weeks.”

And Terry remembers Bayfair when it was a vacant lot. 'It was empty for years,” he says. 'There just wasn't the investment around. And traffic just trickled along Maunganui Road.”

Things have changed – dramatically. Time and growth have engulfed Woolworths.

The traffic is four lanes and bumper to bumper – and Woolworths is just one of 100 businesses and services in the complex today.

'I still have a soft spot for Bayfair,” says Terry, now a man of leisure at Omokoroa. 'I still go back for a coffee to see what's happening.” And he retains a soft spot for the locals.

'The customers were special – they were different.”

But a supermarket manager has different criteria for what makes people different and special.

'Very little shoplifting and not many bounced cheques,” says Terry. 'They were good, honest, down-to-earth people.”

Unlike his experience at an Auckland supermarket. 'They drove flash cars and were dripping with jewellery – but they never had money in their cheque accounts,” he says.

Groceries were good to Terry. He ended up owning his own supermarket – a Pak‘n'Save in Hamilton. It got him a lifestyle where he hasn't felt the winter chill for five years – six months at Omokoroa and six months in Queensland's Noosa. Nice.

Now the grocer's on the other side of the checkout, paying the same prices we all do. And playing golf in the heat.

And what of Bruce – the dressed down, $9 an hour trolley boy? He went ahead and was making $100,000-plus when he went to work for Terry at Pak‘n'Save in Hamilton.

The surfing skateboarder is nowadays probably earning even bigger coin as an area manager for IGA in Queensland. And he's still surfing.

'I picked a good one,” says Terry. And the lesson there is we probably shouldn't make assumptions based solely on appearance.

An interesting addendum. Bayfair's Woolworths is the only supermarket in New Zealand to retain the Woolworths name.

The parent company, Progressive Enterprises, rebranded them as Countdown. But there was already a Countdown in Bayfair.