The corner shop is a colourful hallmark of suburbia. It’s where many kids are first allowed to walk by themselves, a pocket of consumerism in the quiet of the streets. But it’s common nowadays to see the traditional, quintessential-looking corner store boarded up, sunburnt and unoccupied. In Australia, 60 per cent of businesses fail within three years and 20 per cent within a year. Corner shops are pivoting to specialty stores and trying to do it all to survive.
The local corner shop, which I used to go to as a child in Merrylands, is now boarded up.
Rose Water and Flower Water stock the shelves in the Harris Park corner store.
Customers of Lebanese heritage talk to the shop owner in Arabic, making their trip to the corner shop an occasion. They stay for a while, having built a relationship with him.
In Parramatta, a local corner store doubles as a café and a convenience store. Inside, people are encouraged to sit for a minute. Trade continues well into the night.
Inside, a shopkeeper sells a mixture of American and Australian products. The colours are like a playground for customers, she says.
She’s been in the job for seven months, selling anything from shisha to a packet of chips. The store – open for less than a year – is trying to build its profit by posting online.
In the same suburb of Parramatta, a traditional-looking corner shop is closed on a Saturday afternoon, arguably at peak time.
The Lansdowne corner shop has been closed for over ten years now, which is an inconvenience for people who walk by in hopes of quickly dropping in. The old store has remnants of its past, with ‘milk bar’ still written in the window—the name given to Australian corner shops when they were thriving.
On a quiet street in Merrylands, a new kind of corner store no older than a few months old has opened up. Shisha products may survive longer than their predecessors in western Sydney, where they are popular.
This story was supported by Diversity Arts Australia’s StoryCasters program in partnership with The New Point Magazine.
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