The secret life of a corner shop

The feeling that the Birmingham-born 28-year-old proprietor, Amit Sunsoa, could be more proactive persists during my first few hours at the shop, when it transpires he regularly sprays the establishment with ladies’ deodorant after certain customers have departed (“I’m a bit OCD, but some of them do stink”); is regularly baffled and bemused by the local Black Country lingo (“The first time someone called me ‘cocka’, I took offence”); and, together with his 25-year-old brother and part-time helper Ajay, has developed a series of disparaging nicknames for regulars, ranging from “Nails” (for someone who appears to have a phobia of washing his hands) to “Lumboo” (a mildly mocking Punjabi phrase translating as “lanky”) and “Pashab” (a more directly abusive Punjabi word translating as “urine”).

However, by noon on my second day at the newsagent, which like most Asian “corner shops” is not actually on a corner but stands in a converted terrace amid a line of houses, I understand where he’s coming from. I’ve had some dispiriting jobs in my time: washing blood-spattered sheets in a hospital laundry; flipping Whoppers in Burger King; dressing up as a rabbit for a cable TV channel. But they were a walk in the park compared to working in a small newsagent in the Black Country. If you’re not dealing with people paying for 10p lollipops with £50 notes, you’re confronting passing motorists asking for complex directions and not buying anything in return; fending off 15-year-olds trying to buy porn mags and steal sweets; serving 67-year-old pensioners openly purchasing copies of Mayfair and not taking up the offer of a paper bag as they do so (“I’m alroit, thanks”); balancing the politics of allowing certain trusted customers credit while denying others; smiling serenely as locals openly refer to a nearby establishment as “the Paki shop”; taking deep breaths as a regular who lives on benefits accuses Asians like you of taking British jobs when you dare to chase up a £5 debt; apologising to friends annoyed at your failure to respond to lunch and dinner invitations; fending off drunks (Amit keeps a stock of shirts, unwanted gifts from Indian weddings, to flog to men who turn up in ripped clothes at 5am on Saturday mornings); being patronised half to death (“You speak very good English”); and trying not to take offence at strangers mangling your name (Amit gets called everything from “Amid” to “Mohammid” and “Ahmed”, while Ajay gets called everything from “Jay Jay” and “T-Jay” to “Adrian”).

And then there’s the enervating bureaucracy of newsagenting. I shouldn’t say this as a print journalist, but having woken up at 4am to be in at 5am for newspaper deliveries, only for just 25 newspapers to be sold in the first two hours of trade; having witnessed the endless complaints you get from customers about newspapers that have been delivered too late, too wet, or with the sections not separated; understanding how one price change can means hours of having to amend, by hand, hundreds of newspaper accounts; and knowing that the profit margin on a single newspaper can be as small as 5p, it all seems more hassle than it’s worth.

But even this isn’t as tiresome as the biggest challenge of running a corner shop: the endless and mindless small talk. “Ow bin ya? Bostin day, ay it? It ay stop raining in months. It’s getting warmer, ay it? Weren’t the Blues good yesterday? Soz, yow don’t support them, do yow? Yow must be a Wolves man. How’s your uncle, Norman? He’s called Narinder, yow say? My arthritis is giving me terrible gyp. I’d kill for a kipper tie. Tararabit, cocka, see yow tomorra. Great carrier bags these.”

Such chat has, of course, long been an essential aspect of local retailing. In 1948’s The Corner Shop and How to Run It, one Milton Kent, a shopkeeper of seven years, writes “a joke a day keeps the customer gay”, adding that, “If you are friendly with the customers they will get into the habit of running into your shop for their goods.” Also, this kind of banter has always been an important aspect of the Asian corner shop’s role in multicultural Britain. Competition from immigrant-owned retail outlets may have helped to kill off the traditional grocer in the Seventies; the Asian predilection for the retail trade might have been used to mock the community across the world in the form of caricatures such as Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the Asian shopkeeper from The Simpsons; and jokes may abound: “Why can’t Asians play football? Because every time they take a corner they have to open a shop.” But for many Britons their local shopkeeper is the only ethnic minority they talk to, and as such they have long aided good race relations. It is notable that in a radio interview in 2001 Lord Tebbit praised his Asian newsagent even as he attacked multiculturalism.

Nevertheless, spending 13 hours a day chitchatting to people who seem to get their news from the Daily Sport and the Daily Star (Sunsoa sells one copy of The Guardian a week, and two copies of The Times a month), who are chiefly preoccupied with discussing the weather, their ailments and the price of things, is exhausting. There’s not a great deal in the shop worth reading, unless you’re a fan of the Black Country Bugle, leading homing pigeon or tattoo magazines, but you’d never get to read anything anyway because whenever you pick up something for a moment of reflection, someone is wanting to witter. And over time this endless chitchat leaves you feeling existential. Working in a corner shop as an Asian is an exercise in making yourself invisible – nobody, even when the photographer arrives, asks who I am, the assumption, I guess, being that I’m a relative. But the small talk, never touching upon anything important or meaningful, accentuates the feeling that you don’t really exist.

You couldn’t, frankly, pay me a six-figure salary to do this for a living, and yet Sunsoa does it for peanuts. Average spend in the shop is about £1.20. The number of customers rarely exceeds the low hundreds. For one of the days I spend in the shop, total takings are £347.23 – which, given the average profit margin of 20 per cent, amounts to “income”, before costs, of some £69.45. One morning, by 8.30, the takings amount to £45, which means three of us were up at 4am for the sake of making some £9. After costs, Sunsoa says he probably takes home £700 a month, which in turn works out at about £2 an hour. Kent News is a family business and Amit’s brother Ajay volunteers his services, in between freelancing as a bouncer and security professional, but a wage would be unaffordable anyway. “It’s lucky we live at home with our parents,” remarks Amit in a gentle Brummie accent that is regularly described as “posh” by his Black Country clientele. “If you think about it, it’s hardly any money at all. Nothing really.”

Amit is, by nature, optimistic: it’s the reason he agreed to buy the shop in 2007, at the suggestion of his father, who had been made redundant as a foundry worker. The eldest of three sons, he had by that time worked in a finance department for a corporation, dabbled in alternative medicine, and tried his hand at building work, but given various uncles had retail businesses in the Midlands, it seemed a logical thing to try. And his natural cheerfulness is why, when the sun comes out briefly on Tuesday afternoon, seven hours into a 13-hour shift, I find him chirping, “Nice day, isn’t it?”, even though it’s 2C outside, he can’t get out into the sun to enjoy it anyway, and the newsagent only offers a view of a road junction and, if you crane your head, a fried chicken outlet that glories in the name “Kent’s Tuck Inn Fried Chicken”. But even he has been defeated by the experience. Having bought Kent News in 2007 for £27,000, the family put it up for sale for £40,000 in 2009. Now the business could be yours for £23,000. “I’d like to do something else,” he proffers. “My heart’s not in this to be honest. People come in here and they think you’re making a fortune, but it’s thankless, and you have no social life. Asians have always had shops. But I think it’s an outdated thing.”

Indeed, Kent News is a textbook illustration of why, in 1996, the Policy Studies Institute predicted that the days of almost every newsagent and corner shop in Britain being Asian-owned were coming to an end. Why in 2002, Professor David McEvoy, an urban geographer at Liverpool’s John Moores University, estimated that the number of small stores run by Asians had fallen by 23 per cent over a decade to around 11,500 nationwide. Why in February 2004 The Times reported that independent corner shops were closing at a rate of 11 a week. And why in 2006 a 91-page report by the Parliamentary Small Shops Group warned that thousands of Asian-owned corner shops, one of the most visible symbols of multiculturalism, were likely to be wiped out.

The store-building and conversions being carried out by supermarket chains such as Tesco and Sainsbury’s is relentless: a year after taking over Kent News from Asian tenants, a Tesco Express store opened nearby, reducing takings at Kent News significantly. The economic downturn is deep: many of the builders and foundry workers who frequented the shop on the way to work in the morning no longer turn up. The hours are exhausting: 13-hour days, six days a week and half a day on Sunday. The holidays are non-existent: Sunsoa gets one day off a year, Christmas Day, and hasn’t had anything more than that since 2005. The threat of violence is persistent: they have never been attacked, but newspaper boys have been robbed, an uncle in a nearby Midlands store was set about with a hammer, and Asian retailers everywhere were shaken by the murder last year of Gurmail Singh, the 63-year-old grandfather who was killed with bottles of wine in a shop in Huddersfield. Meanwhile, the racism is endemic: it’s touching to see Amit turn down his religious morning prayers out of consideration for his mainly white customers (“I don’t want them to think, ‘Bloody Asians, they’re taking over’ ”), and spend so much time explaining to them why the “n” and “p” words are unacceptable, why the BNP is wrong and how as a Hindu Punjabi he is not expected to marry his cousin or join al-Qaeda. But it’s also depressing.

Frankly, warm, intelligent, funny, second-generation Asians like Sunsoa could be doing better things with their time. According to a recent report from the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, Hindu men are now the second most advantaged social group in the labour market after Jewish men, with 62 per cent working in managerial, professional and associate professional jobs. Why would they wake up at 4am every day for such badly paid work when they can be up at 4am and be superannuated lawyers or bankers instead?

However, for all this, there is one important fact about Kent News that does not tally with the narrative outlined in reports and studies into the Asian retail sector in Britain: of the people who have put in offers for the shop since it has been on sale, the majority have been Asian. And while it is possible that these potential buyers are clueless, desperate, masochistic, and/or insane, it might be significant that there is space at Kent News to expand the shop into something bigger, which, in turn, highlights a recent development in Asian retail that has not been picked up by any major studies, the last of which is nearly six years old now. And the development is this: while it is true that many Asians have left the corner-shop business, and while other groups such as the Turkish are taking over shops, some of those remaining have gone into running successful convenience stores.

How do convenience stores differ from traditional corner shops? Well, apart from the fact that they tend to be bigger, more colourful and designed along the lines of supermarkets: they stock a broader range of merchandise, often functioning as grocery stores, off-licences and newsagents; they open even longer hours, 8am to 10pm, seven days a week typically; many trade under the banner of large wholesale organisations such as Londis, Premier, Budgens, Spar, Costcutter and Nisa, where in return for various fees and loyalty agreements, they receive marketing support and supermarket-quality produce; they’re doing very well, better even, than supermarkets (annual figures from industry think-tank IGD show that as of May 2010, the convenience retail industry was worth £30.1 billion and is growing at 6.3 per cent annually); and most, in my experience, are manned by indifferent, surly staff who are nearly always on the phone to the sub-continent when you pop in for a pint of milk.

Not that Amit Sunsoa is tempted by the prospect of even more work and even longer hours. He’s happy for someone else to take Kent News, which has been trading on this spot since the Thirties, into a possible new age of prosperity. At the time of going to press, the shop is on the verge of being sold to a married Asian couple, and is being prepared for transfer of management. Some £27,000 worth of stock has been reduced to £9,000. Sunsoa once sold everything from fresh sandwiches to potatoes, but now customers have to do with Mr Mash, and “all-day breakfast” in a tin. There are so few cigarette packets on display that it’s as if the display ban has already come into force. Meanwhile, the desultory confectionery stand serves as a reminder of the old estate agent’s maxim, that if your Asian corner shop begins stocking dark-chocolate Bounty bars, you know your area is up and coming. Needless to say, there are no Bounty bars at all. When I ask Amit what he’d like to do next he replies, “Los Angeles. I’d like to run a restaurant or something in California. I’m interested in food.” But for his brother, who has barely said a word during my time in the shop, even this is not far enough. “New Zealand,” he interjects. “I’d like to go to New Zealand.”