Why The Corner Shop Has Come Into Its Own

The Food Programme

BBC

Food, Arts

4.4 • 977 Ratings

🗓️ 21 June 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Remember March? Before the UK lockdown. Remember desolate supermarket shelves? Toilet rolls, eggs, flour nowhere to be found?

Where did you turn? Chances are you may have hit the jackpot in your local corner shop.

Sales in corner shops and independent grocers were up by 63 per cent in the three months to May according to industry analysts Kantar. For many small grocery shops, business has never been better. But as Sheila Dillon finds out, that's gone hand in hand with exceptionally long hours, miles and miles driven to cash & carries, finding new local suppliers, entrepreneurial social distancing solutions, and alot of community support.

In this programme Sheila checks in with the people running corner shops across the country, and with their customers. She hears from Caroline Craig and Sophie Missing, whose local shops inspired them to write 'The Cornershop Cookbook'. And Babita Sharma, author of 'The Corner Shop: The True Story of the Little Shops - and Shopkeepers - Keeping Britain Going' talks about her experience of growing up 'behind the counter'.

Presented by Sheila Dillon. Produced in Bristol by Clare Salisbury.

Transcript

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0:43.0	Welcome to our world.
0:45.0	From cooking to culture, politics to pleasure.
0:48.0	We hope you enjoy it.
0:50.0	I'm just about to call my corner shop, which I had to leave behind before lockdown.
0:56.0	I'm going to speak to, I hope, Rosie.
1:00.0	Hello, Rosie, it's Sheila. Hello. Well this is funny isn't it? Could you start recording?
1:08.0	Could you press the button on your little record thing? Okay, I'm recording now.
1:12.0	Great. You're listening to the food
1:15.2	program that place for hungry minds. Almost all of us have a corner shop that
1:20.9	little place that delivers your paper where you can always pop in for a pint of milk and emergency tin of tomatoes and sometimes a somosa or an illicit ice lolly in my case. But as you're about to hear and what perhaps we've just
1:35.0	started to grasp over the past few weeks, those corner shops are about so much
1:40.8	more. They tell us stories about our history, our economy and who we are.
	...

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