Loading
For a fewYour browser does not support the element. weeks every December, Denmark Hill Food & Wine is transformed from a corner shop in south London into grotto. About 250 parcels are scattered about the poky shop, beneath Pulp Riot hair dye, bottles of Ribena, tea bags and condoms. Big packages are stuffed into overflowing sacks; small ones are arranged neatly in requisitioned shopping baskets. It is mid-morning. Another 250 packages are due at 1pm.Becoming a gonzo post office is only the latest shift in the evolution of Bossman, a name (originating in London slang) for those who run a small shop in Britain. Corner shops have become the high street of last resort. Post offices and banks have retreated, leaving the fiddly tasks of paying in cash and collecting parcels or benefits underserved. Bossman has filled the gap.It is these services that have helped Britain’s 35,000-strong independent corner shops stay alive. Parcels are only one part. Customers of online-only banks, such as Monzo, can deposit cash wherever there is a PayPoint, a British payments company that works with corner shops. Benefits can be paid out in cash via corner shops in the same way. About 4m households—roughly one in seven—are on pre-payment gas and electricity meters, meaning they have to schlep to a shop whenever it runs out. Bossman is happy to offer almost any service, provided enough customers buy a can of Diet Coke on their way out.Corner shops have always moulded themselves to fit British society. When supermarkets first emerged in the 1950s, they began to steamroller small shops. They were kept alive by arrivals from Punjab and Gujarat, who leapt at the opportunity to swap factory work for the chance to work for themselves. Corner shops went from producing politicians such as Margaret Thatcher, a former prime minister, to politicians such as Priti Patel, a former home secretary. Strip out race and the story of the made good is a corner-shop constant.What Bossman stocks tells a story, too. Corner shops thrive via a cocktail of convenience and vice. Once the staple business of corner shops was cigarettes, alcohol and newspapers, alongside pornographic magazines, with black dots delicately placed over nipples. Now, amid the ramshackle piles of parcels that adorn every other shop, adverts for vapes have replaced posters of the Marlboro Man. American-style candy does well. So does Monster, an energy drink that competes with Red Bull via the ruse of selling itself by the half-litre. At the same time, fresh produce now takes up more shelf space. Bossman will provide whatever someone needs whenever they need it, whether milk and pornography back then or a lump of ginger and a pint of Monster today.Bossman is in the right part of the market. Convenience commands a premium. Trip frequency is growing (now just under three times a week) as is basket size, says Lumina Intelligence, which researches the sector. The “treat mission”—a fantastic piece of jargon—is on the up. Forget the lipstick effect, when women splash out on affordable luxuries in a downturn. Bossman benefits from the Tony’s Chocolonely effect: if people cannot afford a night out, they will splurge £4 ($5.10) on the lurid Dutch chocolate to eat in front of the telly instead.Parcels will become only a more significant driver of footfall, and not just at Christmas. Evri, a delivery company, now drops 180m parcels a year into shops, or 22.5% of all its deliveries. Each packet earns a shop 30p or so. The hassle is worth it. Some handle a few hundred a week; others manage thousands. A lot of people have to run a calorie gauntlet at the till.Shoplifting may be at a 20-year high. Yet inside any corner shop is a testament to man’s better nature, with thousands of pounds’ worth of parcels, containing everything from children’s toys to subtly packaged iPhones left unstolen. The Post Office has become a byword for bureaucratic malfeasance, wrongly accusing hundreds of sub-postmasters of theft, as well as poor service, with package collection available for a few hours per day, whereas Bossman is open from dawn until the dead of night. Bossman Britain is a vision of a high-trust society.For years, the big grocers have attempted to muscle into the convenience sector. Bossman has held almost steady. Independents still account for 71% of all convenience stores. About half of them have their own brand. The other half are franchises such as Nisa, owned by the Co-op, or Londis, owned by Tesco. If you cannot beat Bossman, join him. After all, Bossman has tools that Tesco does not. Encouraging staff to work overnight can be expensive; cajoling family members to do the 4am shift, or doing it yourself, is cheap. Bossman economics are different.The life of a Bossman is not all rosy. Rises in the minimum wage and employer national-insurance contributions will hurt. Government is increasingly fussy. A ban on the sale of cigarettes to anyone born from 2009 onwards will in time cut an already depleted moneymaker. Single-use vapes, another cash cow, are to be nixed. A ban on teenagers buying energy drinks is mooted. From this perspective, the future looks grim.Yet Bossman will prevail. To see how, pop down on Christmas Day. Bossman will be busy. Searches for “convenience store” peak during the festive week. Parcels must be returned (one year, PayPoint clocked a parcel return at 6.30am, suggesting an emotional start to festivities in a corner of Merseyside). Perhaps the money in the boiler has run out. Maybe forgot to buy milk. Bossman will be there. Someone has to be.
