For baked beans, bulbs and now banking, corner shops are vital – and they're thriving

Martha Gill

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Certain narratives are hard to kill. One of those is that corner shops are reaching the end of the road.

It was once true. In 2010, Mary Portas mourned that our love affair with the supermarket was destroying "these cornerstones of family life". In 2018, the Daily Mail predicted that online shopping-obsessed millennials would finish them off for good. Meanwhile the Evening Standard ran a campaign to "save our small shops". ("How on earth did it take so long for such a campaign to be launched?" asked the Guardian.) But corner shops, against all the odds, are thriving.

There are now 50,500 corner-shops in Britain - up from 47,000 in 2020. These are shops roughly defined as convenience stores: open long hours, less than 3,000 sq ft, and selling everything from hair dye to aspirin to baked beans to pet food. Some are part of franchises such as Nisa, owned by the Coop, but 71% are stubbornly independent. The market is valued at £48.8bn a year and growing.

Their strange survival is tinged with irony - it is partly a result of the forces once predicted to end them. Online services have taken a scythe to newsagents, post offices, off-licences and banks, and corner shops have mopped up the remains, becoming a condensed high street all by themselves.

"Most are licensed now, most sell newspapers, some have ATMs and allow cash deposits," says James Lowman, chief executive of the Association of Convenience Stores. Many also act as a de facto post office for online deliveries. People still need to pick up parcels, draw cash, and collect benefits.