Why corner?

Written by

Ophelia Benson

in

Words.

Trump appeared confounded by a common phrase during a public appearance in Nevada on Thursday.

…

Delivering a speech on the benefits of his policy, which allows employees who receive tips to deduct up to $25,000 in tips when filing their taxes, the 79-year-old came across a term he claimed to have never heard before.

“The great big beautiful bill also slashed taxes on millions of Americans, small businesses, including restaurants, dry cleaners, corner stores,” the president said, before pausing to add an aside.

“What is a corner store?” He asked the room. “I’ve never heard that term. I know what a corner store is, but I’ve never heard it described… A corner store. Who the hell wrote that, please?” He added, looking around as the audience laughed.

Ok but this one time I don’t think he was just lost in the fog. “Corner store” is a peculiar label because as far as I can tell it doesn’t actually mean corner store but rather convenience store aka small general store that sells the kind of thing you don’t want to go to a supermarket for. It’s an idiom. I think what he meant was not “what is it” but “why is it called that”. As someone who frequently wonders why things are called that, I think we can give him a pass on this one. Mind you, it is very eccentric and perhaps diagnostic to break into one’s own speech about something else to muse on the meaning of a common idiom.

So why are they called corner stores?

When I was a child we lived a few miles outside of town, with fields all around, growing alfalfa or pasturing cows. About three fields away there was a small everything store, which I would walk to through the fields on Saturday mornings to spend my allowance on the penny candy in a glass and wood case at the front of the store. It feels like about 1850 at this distance. Anyway…it was literally a corner store, but we called it the general store. Or Musselman’s, the name of the owner, known to the grownups as Spud.

So, are all 7/11s on corners, or are some in the middle of the block?

Comments

39 responses to “Why corner?”

  1. Artymorty Avatar
    Artymorty

    My guess is that it sounds folksy and evokes small communities, in kinda the same way that speechwriters endlessly harp about Main Street USA.

    Such geographic references to neighbourhood street corners and small-town central thoroughfares conjure a Mayberry image that pols on both sides of the aisle just love.

    Me, I’ve always just called them convenience stores — well, except when I lived in Montreal, where they’re called dépanneurs (literally, something or someone that gets you out of a jam) or just “the Dep”.

    And I probably dabbled in using “bodega” once or twice, trying, pretentiously, to sound like a local while visiting New York.

  2. iknklast Avatar
    iknklast

    I never called them corner stores, but I’ve heard them called that. Like Arty, we called them convenience stores (though when you live more than 9 miles from the nearest one, they aren’t particularly convenient).

    I suspect the origin of the phrase dates back to earlier in the last century, when zoning didn’t prohibit such stores in residential areas, and they might more likely be on the corner to be convenient to more streets? That would be my guess. Now that we zoned everything to be in its own little neighborhood, it just sounds strange.

  3. Freeminder Avatar
    Freeminder

    Corner shops in the UK were built during the mass expansions of towns and cities in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, as there was a need for local stores, close to homes, selling everyday items and more. Best example: Ronnie Barker’s masterpiece, Open All Hours.

  4. Papito Avatar
    Papito

    Trump is losing his marbles. He can’t recognize common terms anymore. This will continue until he’s wondering what the word “door” means, or the word “hand.” And his acolytes will think he’s made a brilliant witticism.

    “Corner store” is a very common term, across the US, for a small neighborhood store that sells a variety of things. It’s called “corner store” because the ideal location for such a shop is on a street corner, so that it is visible from four directions.

    Different cities or regions in the US can have different words for this type of store. In New York, it’s frequently also called a “bodega.” In Boston, the traditional term is “spa,” though that usage is waning. In Michigan, it’s a “party store.” Elsewhere it’s a “convenience store,” or a “mini-mart,” though I (urbanite that I am) consider a “convenience store” to be something in a non-urban location, something people drive rather than walk to.

  5. Artymorty Avatar
    Artymorty

    What the actual fuck? They call them SPAS in Boston?!

    I can intuit how “bodega” came into usage in Brooklyn. I can’t even begin to imagine the etymology behind Boston’s use of “spa”.

  6. Artymorty Avatar
    Artymorty

    @Freeminder,

    A contender for the greatest British corner shop: when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards opened up their little store on Stella Street in Surbiton, where, naturally, Michael Caine, Jack Nicholson, David Bowie, Dirk Bogarde, Alan Rickman, Joe Pesci, and Al Pacino also resided…

    Side-splittingly funny.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTCSzP6dmmo

  7. Omar Avatar
    Omar

    In the suburb of Sydney where I spent my childhood and youth, shopkeepers prized a corner location because it stood out and caught the pedestrian traffic on two streets, typically at 90 degrees to each other. Competition was also keen for any corner block close to a railway station entrance, as pedestrians are more inclined to impulse-buy than are those enclosed within a car. So IMHO, Papito is on the money.

    The current trend here in Australia appears to be online ordering plus home delivery, particularly with fuel prices bouncing around like basket-balls the way they are doing right now.

  8. iknklast Avatar
    iknklast

    The current trend here in Australia appears to be online ordering plus home delivery

    That’s become the current trend here in my house, too ;-)

    I hate driving; such a waste to keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road when there are dozens of other things you could do with your time.

  9. What a Maroon Avatar
    What a Maroon

    Artymorty,

    In Boston they also call (or called) soda “tonic” and water fountains “bubblers”, so, yeah.

    As for “corner stores”, that doesn’t conjure up images of 7-11 in my mind. I think of Nap’s, which later became Luigi’s, where we used to get our candy–a small, locally-owned grocery store (which in this case happened to be on a corner).

  10. Papito Avatar
    Papito

    Well, Artymorty, it’s got to do with the Walloon word for spring…. and the fact that corner drugstores used to have soda fountains.

    But you can’t buy alcohol there. For that, you have to go to a packie (though you might buy a spuckie).

  11. Artymorty Avatar
    Artymorty

    Apparently, the etymology of “spa” for corner store comes from the fact that they evolved from soda fountain shops. Soda fountains = place were you find sparkling/fizzy water. Spas were originally resorts built around natural mineral springs that had sparkling/fizzy water.

    In Europe, spa = resort where you find sparkling water.

    In Boston, spa = corner store where you find sparkling water.

    Spa = fizzy water place.

    Ah.

    What a refreshing little splash of knowledge.

  12. Artymorty Avatar
    Artymorty

    oops, Papito beat me to it!

  13. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

    Ya, see, all this describes Musselman’s. It was at a corner where two rural roads met, so it did stand out. It was the kind of store that sold everything.

    I consulted Google this morning when writing this, so I was able to spell Musselman correctly, but even better, I found a photo of a man talking to the owners who preceded Spud Musselman, and that man was my uncle.

  14. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

  15. Freemage Avatar
    Freemage

    Chicagoan here. I’ve always associated “corner store” with owner-operated shops that provided a lot of the stuff convenience stores now do, but usually without it all being the same in-house brand. And yeah, they were almost always on the corner, particularly in the city or close-in suburbs, because of location. Often they have an apartment or two overhead, as well, that may be where the owner and their family live, or that they rent out for extra income.

    And yeah, I’m using the past tense, here. While they aren’t completely gone, 7-11 and the actual brand-name Convenience Stores, which are usually located in strip malls rather than their own building, pushed them out in the usual fashion of capitalist marketing.

  16. NightCrow Avatar
    NightCrow

    In England ‘corner shop’ is more usual than ‘corner store’. A corner shop is typically a ‘convenience store’: a local shop where you might pop in for something you have just realised that you are running low on, or that you forgot to buy at the supermarket. They are located on street corners in residential areas.

  17. Sackbut Avatar
    Sackbut

    Thanks, all, for clearing up a mystery from my childhood, something I had wondered about but hadn’t thought to investigate. There was a store called Gem Spa in the area where I lived in New York. I used to get egg creams there. I could never figure out why it was called a “spa”; now I know.

    (I won’t link to the article on egg creams, because it’s wrong. While the most common egg cream contained only flavored syrup and soda water, fancy places also used milk, and the fanciest I ever had also added a dollop of whipped egg white on top, thus containing both egg and cream.)

  18. chigau Avatar
    chigau

    In my youth, my experience with “Musselman” was as variant of “Mohammedan”. Both now deprecated terms.

    Then I goggled Muselmann.

    Sometime I think Hell is a good idea.

  19. chigau Avatar
    chigau

    When I moved from my small town to the bigcity, I found that ALL of the small convenience stores were located on corners.

    I reckon that’s where the name came from.

  20. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

    The most common egg cream contained only flavored syrup and soda water??? Not in MY New Yawk – they were always milky. The way to describe them to out of towners was as an ice cream soda without an actual scoop of ice cream. A little milk, syrup, fill with seltzer.

  21. Rob Avatar
    Rob

    In New Zealand, at least when I was younger, we did call them corner stores because they were normally on corners. More frequently we called them Dairys – I guess originally because the sold dairy products? Convenience state has been gaining traction in recent times but is regarded as an Americanism.

  22. Artymorty Avatar
    Artymorty

    @Ophelia,

    Wow, that’s fascinating on many levels. (Um, Gallup?! That’s a surprise!)

  23. guest Avatar
    guest

    @Ophelia – very cool, I’m glad you found that photo and shared it. And just to share a totally random piece of trivia, the British Library’s book storage facility is in Boston Spa, which is where my mind went when I saw those two words juxtaposed in Papito’s comment. (Another failing of the blog’s new look, aside from the (to me) serious one of not seeing the number of comments on each post on the overall blog page – no comment numbers, so we can’t refer to a specific one when we’re commenting.)

  24. Harald Hanche-Olsen Avatar
    Harald Hanche-Olsen

    Since some of us have now learned that “corner stores” are called bodegas in New York, and since this is an animal friendly blog, let me present Bodega cats of New York!

  25. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

    I was amused and pleased to see that photo of my uncle.

  26. Papito Avatar
    Papito

    My childhood experience with Musselman had nothing to do with Islam. That’s a German last name.

  27. Sackbut Avatar
    Sackbut

    @Ophelia re egg creams

    I know, right? I always made them at home with milk, too. But if you read Wikipedia and many other sources, they claim that the drink contained neither egg nor cream, and it’s a big mystery why it’s called an egg cream. Not to me it isn’t. To be fair, a bunch of places that do sell drinks by that name make them with only syrup and soda.

  28. Athel Cornish-Bowden Avatar
    Athel Cornish-Bowden

    Musulman is still the standard word for Muslim in French.

  29. Acolyte of Sagan Avatar
    Acolyte of Sagan

    Bodegas are so-named because that’s what New York’s Hispanic immigrants called the convenience stores they opened to serve their community, ‘bodega’ being the Spanish for a grocery store.

  30. Karen the Chemist Avatar
    Karen the Chemist

    What a Maroon, Apr 17:

    In Boston they also call (or called) soda “tonic” and water fountains “bubblers”, so, yeah.

    When did Bostonians start calling water fountains bubblers? When I was in the Boston area for college in the early 1980s, whenever I called a drinking fountain a bubbler, I got strange looks.

    Calling a drinking fountain a bubbler is a Wisconsin thing. I think I saved an old newspaper bit about the term bubbler. I’ll see if I can find it.

    As to corner/convenience stores: There was a store, near where I grew up, called Ben Franklin or Ben Franklin Discount. Sometimes it was called the Five and Dime. On the sign on the front of the store there was “5c*” and 10c*”, on the sides. 5c on the left and 10c on the right, according to my memory, flanking the store name (hence the nickname?). I don’t recall if there was just the one store or if there was a chain of them. They had penny candy when I was a kid. It was in a strip mall with a grocery store, a pharmacy, household appliance/hardware store, a George Webbs (a diner), and a few others. Above the grocery store were offices, including a dentist.

    It was a few blocks from my house. Us kids would walk or ride our bikes to it. Mom would drive to the grocery store because of the amount she’d buy. When us kids were old enough, we were to get ourselves to the dentist (walk or bike).

    * Imagine the “cents” symbol

  31. Karen the Chemist Avatar
    Karen the Chemist

    Re bubbler:

    From the May 16, 2002 issue of the Isthmus (Madison, WI)

    In the “20 Years Ago” column

    As for calling a fountain a bubbler, Carrie Estill, a researcher with the UW’s Dictionary of American Regional English, explains that the term was first used in 1914 by the Kohler Company of Kohler, Wis., to describe their new ‘continuous flow bubbler.’ … Apparently the name followed the Kohler product wherever it was sold, and the nickname took root in [almost] all of Wisconsin.

    That could be how the term got to Boston. I was only in parts of Boston. Maybe when I was there, I wasn’t in any of the areas of Boston where the term was used.

  32. Mike Haubrich Avatar
    Mike Haubrich

    I think it’s one of those phrases that’s more idiomatic than descriptive. But one of the reasons that I would never like to live in a suburb or a Planned Unit Development is that there are very rarely any corner stores within walking distance. It’s another reason that those neighborhoods are automobile dependent. When the nearest corner store is over a mile away, just running out to get a loaf of bread means hopping in the jalopy. I do like the word “bodega” for it, because it evokes the Mission District in San Francisco and my walking distance store was a half a block away, named “La Bodeguita.”

  33. J.A. Avatar
    J.A.

    I remember corner stores in our neighborhood back in the early 1960s when I was a kid in Iowa and walking to them to get groceries for my mom. We had one car and my dad drove it to work, so if something was needed it was only a two block walk to get it. I got a nickel to spend on something for myself too!

  34. Steven Avatar
    Steven

    Some stores are destinations: grocery stores, big-box stores, movie theaters. People go there deliberately.

    Some stores rely on passing traffic, like convenience stores and gas stations. Stores that rely on passing traffic are preferentially built at intersections, so that they can capture the traffic on two streets. Thus, the “corner” store.

  35. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

    Aha! That makes sense. Papito also pointed out the four directions advantage, and the destination v passing traffic distinction ties it up.

  36. Rob Avatar
    Rob

    An example of the convenience of ‘corner stores’. Back many years ago when I was young and sharing a house with others, we’d be watching TV of a night and advertisements would come on. Someone would yell out ‘refreshments’. The whole bunch of us would sprint down to the nearest intersection ~80m away which had a corner/convenience store/dairy on each corner. Each person would head to a different store and we’d be back in front of the TV before the end of the Ad break.

    Gentler, simpler times I tell ya.

  37. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

    Hahahaha that’s funny.

  38. Karen the Chemist Avatar
    Karen the Chemist

    I remembered another nickname used for the Ben Franklin store: the dime store.

  39. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

    The dime store was certainly the name used in my family back in the day. I don’t even know what its actual name was.

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