page_title: Convenience store
section_title: United Kingdom
hierarchical_section_title: Convenience store / By country / United Kingdom
caption_attribution_description: Corrie fans on the Manchester studio set, Sept. 2000
context_page_description: A convenience store, convenience shop, or corner store is a small retail business that stocks a range of everyday items such as coffee, groceries, snack foods, confectionery, soft drinks, tobacco products, over-the-counter drugs, toiletries, newspapers, and magazines. In some jurisdictions, convenience stores are licensed to sell alcohol, although many such jurisdictions limit such beverages to those with relatively low alcoholic content such as beer and wine. Such stores may also offer money order and wire transfer services, along with the use of a fax machine or photocopier for a small per-copy cost. Some also offer to sell tickets or recharge a smart card, like the OPUS card in Montreal. They differ from general stores and village shops in that they are not in a rural location and are used as a convenient supplement to larger stores.
  A convenience store may be part of a gas/petrol station, so customers can purchase goods conveniently while filling their vehicle with fuel. It may be located alongside a busy road, in an urban area, near a railway or railroad station, or at another transport hub.
context_section_description: The corner shop in the United Kingdom grew from the start of the industrial revolution, with large populations moving from the agricultural countryside to newly built model townships and later terraced housing in towns and cities. The corner shops were locally owned small businesses, started by entrepreneurs who had often had other careers before taking on the large start-up capital requirement required to establish such a trading business. Many well-known high street retail brands, such as Marks and Spencer, Sainsbury's and latterly Tesco, originated during the Victorian era as simple, family-owned corner shops.
  The name corner shop originated because such shops are traditionally located on the corner of an intersection.
  The reign of the corner shop and the weekly market started to fade post–World War II, with the combination of the personal motor car and the introduction from the 1950s onwards of the American-originated supermarket format. The market shift in price and convenience led to the establishment of common trading brands operating as virtual franchises to win back the consumer, including Budgens, Costcutter, Londis, Nisa and SPAR. There was also a consolidation of some shops under some larger corporate-owned brands, including One Stop and RS McColl.
  The primary competition to this privately owned 'corner shop' model came from the network of consumer cooperatives which were created after the success of that created by the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers in 1844. Rather than being owned by individuals, these shops were owned by their customer-members and, owing to their popularity, the number of co-operative shops had reached 1,439 by 1900. Co-operatives came about as a response to the problem of adulterated food which existed at the time and later they enabled members to buy types of food that they would otherwise be unable to afford. At their peak in the 1950s, consumers' co-operatives accounted for approximately 20% of the UK grocery market, however with increasing competition this has decreased to around 6% in 2015. Due to a number of mergers over the years, the grocery co-operative sector in the UK is now predominately composed of the national The Co-operative Group and a few large regional co-operative societies such as the Midcounties Co-operative and Scotmid. Today, the majority of food retailing co-operatives societies brand their convenience shops as The Co-operative Food and together they form the second-largest convenience shop chain in the UK and the largest by number of shops, with one in every UK postal code.
  From the late-1960s onwards, many such shops started to be owned by expatriate African-born Indians, expelled from their homelands by the newly independent countries rulers. Under the Shops Act 1950, Sunday trading had been illegal for most traders, with exceptions only allowed for small shops selling perishable items (i.e.: milk, bread, butter, fresh meat and vegetables), and most shops that were not off licences had to close at 20:00. However, the Sunday Trading Act 1994 allowed large format shops over 12,000 square feet (1,100 m²) to open on a Sunday and later extended to 24/7 opening.
  In more recent time, due to a combination of competition laws and a lack of large-scale development space, many of the larger retail brands have now developed shop formats based around convenience shop and corner shop scale spaces, including Sainsbury's Local, Little Waitrose and Tesco Express.
caption: A typical British independently owned and traded corner shop, as modelled on the street of the fictional ITV soap opera Coronation Street, set in Manchester
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