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General store
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In Australia, Canada and the United States, a general store is a retailer located in a small town or in a rural area with a broad selection of merchandise crammed into a relatively small space where people from the town and surrounding rural areas come to purchase all their general goods, both in stock and special order from warehouses. In the United Kingdom, similar retailers tend to be referred to as a "village shop" in rural areas or a "corner shop" in urban areas or suburbs. In New Zealand, they are called 'dairies' (from dairy, milk products).
General stores often sell staple food items such as milk and bread, and various household goods such as hardware and electrical supplies. The concept of the general store is very old, and although some still exist, there are far fewer than there once were, due to urbanization, urban sprawl, and the relatively recent phenomenon of big-box stores.
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In Canada the French term depanneur is used for a general store in the province of Quebec.
Village shops have become increasingly rare in the densely populated parts of England, although they remain common in remote rural areas of Scotland, particularly The Highlands,Wales and Northern Ireland along with some areas of England such as North Yorkshire, Northumberland and The Lake District. Their rarity in England is due to several factors, such as the rise in car ownership, competition from large chain supermarkets, the rising cost of village properties, and the increasing trend of the wealthy to own holiday homes in picturesque villages, consequently houses which used to be occupied full-time are often vacant for long periods. Of those villages in England who still have have shops, these days they are often a combination of services under one roof to increase the liklihood of profit and survival. Extra services may include a post office private businesses services such as tearooms, cafes, and bed and breakfast accommodation; or state services such as libraries and General Practitioner (GP) or Dental clinics; and charity partners such as Women's Institute (WI) coffee mornings held on the day most elderly villagers might collect their weekly pensions. Some villages now no longer have either shop or post office, but the village pub has largely survived and these often function as small shops or post offices as well. Many village pubs have become notable dining experiences, attracting trade from their villagers, tourists and nerby town dwellers with their trendy Chefs or local produce/organic menus. Community shops have become popular in some villages, often jointly owned and run by many villagers as a co-operative. The Village Retail Services Association (ViRSA) promotes the role and function of the village shop in the UK. Many modern village shops choose to stock items which draw in customers from neighbouring areas who are seeking locally sourced, organic and specialist produce such as local cuts of meat, local cheeses, wines etc. In towns and cities the cornershop has largely survived by dominating the local and light night convenience market. The 1970s saw the death of the traditional grocery shop, which would have once dominated in the kind of buildings most corner shops operate from today, such old traditional family grocery stores began to face competition on two fronts: on the one hand from immigrant-owned corner shops, trading longer hours (typically British Asian families), and on the other from the rise of the supermarket, which amalgamated many specialist retailers such as butchers, bakers, and grocers under one roof at increasingly cheaper prices and with room for a greater choice of products. With the gradual loss of the traditional grocers came the loss of many aspects of old British Shopping culture such as Grocery deliveries and being enabled to have a "Tic" account with the Grocer, a form of unofficial advanced credit. The cornershop is now much more the local convenience shop than the family grocer of days gone by. Cornershops are usually so called because they are located on the corner plot or street end of a row of terraced housing, often Victorian or Edwardian factory workers' houses. The doorway into the shop was usually on the corner of the plot to maximise shop floor space within, this also offered two display windows onto two opposing streets. Many have now altered the original shop front layout in favour of a mini-supermarket style. Although it is common that cornershops found it the [UK] were former Grocer Shops, other specialist retailers also occupied such slots and have suffered the same fate of being largely replaced by super and hypermakets, such retailers as Greengrocers, Bakers, Butchers and Fishmongers.
Many British TV and Radio series, especially soap operas, feature corner shops or village shops as cornerstones for community gatherings and happenings. Prominent examples are the Village shop in Ambridge, the fictional village in the BBC Radio 4 series, The Archers, (1950-present day). Or the ITV1 soap opera Coronation Street (1960-present day) featuring a cornershop; it was owned, until recently, by Alf Roberts the grocer and after his death in the late 1990s was bought by Dev Alahan, reflecting this common change in British culture. The dying days and changing culture of the traditional British Grocer was explored to great effect in the BBC TV comedy series Open All Hours (1976-1985), set in the real suburb of Balby in Doncaster. The band Cornershop in part base their image on the perception that many convenience stores are now owned by British Asian people. In terms of British popular culture these media representations give some idea of the importance attached to local shops in the national psyche and as a mainstay of community life. The former British Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher, aka Margaret Thatcher was the daughter of a Grocer, spending her formative years living above her Father's cornershop in Grantham, Lincolnshire. Her father's name, strangely enough, was Alfred Roberts.
During the first half of the 20th century, general stores were displaced in many areas of the United States by many different types of specialized retailers. But from the 1960s through the 1990s, many small specialized retailers were in turn crushed by the so-called "category killers", which are "big-box" wholesale-type retailers large enough to carry the majority of best-selling goods in a specific category like sporting goods or office supplies.
However, the convenience inherent in the general store has been revived in the form of the modern convenience store and the hypermarket, which can be seen as taking the general store or convenience store concept to its largest possible implementation.
TV shows with a historic or nostalgic flavour have depicted general stores in small communities as much as gathering places for the exchange of news and gossip as for their stated purpose of the retail trade. Some examples of this slice of American history include Godsey's store in The Waltons and the Olsens' store in Little House on the Prairie. A modern reflection of the convenience store's place and importance within American communities is the Kwik-E-Mart, run by Apu, in the animated series The Simpsons. See Convenience stores in popular culture.