The Corner Shop

By guest writer, Rob

They say the corner shop is dying…

Large supermarket chains are slowly pushing them out, but I like to play as the saviour, well, to one shop anyway, until today.

As I spend nearly £20 per week at said shop I was stunned to have experienced ‘the bag’ incident today, I had purchased 2 x 2ltrs of diet coke and a 750cl bottle of vodka. I asked the lady behind the counter (The co owner) If I could have a second bag to split the weight as I had a fair walk ahead of me and the weight of all the bottles in one bag was sure to slice off my fingers. She looked at me in amazement as though I had just spat in her jar of penny sweets. I explained my predicament and she replied with “5p” … I said I would struggle home with just one bag and promptly left.
I have shopped there nearly 3 years and lived only a few houses away.

If these little shops want to co exist with the so called ‘Monster’ chains then they have to have a long hard think about what they can offer that sainsbury’s (200 yards away in this case) can’t offer me. The first thing and the easiest thing would be a personal, pleasant, one to one experience, a ‘hello, how are you’ would be good instead of inspecting the cctv as I wonder out of view. The only reason that i shop there is that the coke is chilled as apposed to sainsbury’s, but if she was nice to me it would be 2-0 to the corner shop.
At the end of the day it was 5p she wasn’t willing to lose, now she has lost £20 a week.

Cool. That was written by non other then published illustrator and friend, Rob.
check his work out….