The Corner Shop

For more than thirty years, Singh's Corner Shop had stood at the end of Garnet Street in the West End of Glasgow. It sold a bit of everything: milk, bread, newspapers, birthday cards, batteries, and the best samosas in the city, which Mr. Singh's wife, Harpreet, made fresh every morning. Mr. Singh knew most of his customers by name, and many of them had been buying their milk from him since they were children.

Then, one spring, a large supermarket opened just five minutes' walk away. It had twenty checkouts, a car park, a bakery and a cafe. Prices were lower on almost everything, and it stayed open until midnight. Within three months, Mr. Singh's takings had fallen by almost half. Some days, he served fewer than forty customers. He cut his own wages, then stopped ordering certain products, and by the end of the summer he was quietly wondering whether he could afford to renew the lease.

His granddaughter, Anjali, found out by accident. She was nineteen, studying business at university, and she helped in the shop on Saturdays. One afternoon she found a pile of unpaid invoices under the till. "Grandad, why didn't you tell anyone?" she asked. Mr. Singh shrugged. "What could anyone do? I can't compete with them on price. They buy a million tins of beans at a time. I buy two boxes."

Anjali spent the evening thinking about this. Her grandfather was right: the shop could never be cheaper than the supermarket. But perhaps it did not need to be. That weekend, she stood outside the shop with a clipboard and asked customers what they would like to see. The answers surprised her. People wanted things the supermarket did not offer: fresh food made locally, a place to collect parcels, someone who remembered their name and, again and again, Harpreet's samosas.

Over the next few months, she and her grandparents made a series of changes. They cleared two shelves of products that hardly ever sold and filled them with bread from a small bakery round the corner and vegetables from a farm outside the city. They signed up to a parcel collection service, which brought dozens of new people through the door every week. Harpreet began selling lunch boxes of samosas, rice and curry, and Anjali set up an online account with photos of the food and the stories of the regulars. She also persuaded her grandfather to accept card payments, something he had resisted for years because of the bank charges.

The turning point, however, came from the neighbors. When Mrs. Campbell, a retired teacher who lived above the shop, heard that it might close, she was horrified. She printed leaflets, organized a meeting in the local church hall and started a campaign called "Keep Garnet Street Local". More than two hundred people came to the meeting. Some offered to help in the shop, a local plumber offered to repair the old fridges for free, and a group of parents promised to buy their children's snacks there on the way to school instead of driving to the supermarket.

A journalist from a Glasgow newspaper wrote an article about the campaign, and the photo of Mr. Singh behind his counter, surrounded by smiling neighbors, was shared thousands of times. The following Saturday, there was a queue outside the shop before it had even opened. Harpreet sold out of samosas by eleven o'clock.

Of course, the supermarket did not close, and Mr. Singh's shop will never make the profits it made in the past. But a year later, its takings were higher than before the supermarket opened, and Mr. Singh had been able to pay off his debts and renew the lease for another five years. Anjali now looks after the shop's accounts, and her lecturer has asked her to present the shop's story to next year's students as a case study.

Mr. Singh still has his doubts about card machines. But there is a new sign above the door, painted by Mrs. Campbell's grandson. It says: "Singh's. Your corner, your shop."