Tell Me About Your Corner Shop
All hail the unsung hero of a quiet, hyperlocal life
The corner shop. The convenience store. The bodega, conbini, off-license. No matter what you call it or where you find it, the corner shop is really the unsung hero of a simple life. And in the WFH space-time continuum, it’s often the only way to break up a workday.
I’ve long had a great affection for corner shops and convenience stores. I suspect it might stem from the fact that walking to the local market to buy otherwise un-allowed junk food (usually Hostess products) was the first thing I was allowed to do alone in my pre-teen years. But recently, I was reminded of how integral a good one can become to your life.
In 2020, I moved from northeast London—where many of the Turkish-owned corner shops have perfected that venn diagram of hipster health-food meets classic junk-food meets necessary adulthood staples—to a seaside town outside of London where such shops were seemingly few and far between. Gone were my furtive 9:30 pm trips out for niche bottles of mineral water, kombucha, or organic wine, paired with Haribo sweets, honey-coated almonds, or chili lime quinoa chips. My nearest corner shop had just the grim basics, and a surly shopkeeper to go along with it. It was either that, or a small outpost of the chain supermarket Tesco — even worse. As a…
