Category: Nostalgia

The corner store is gone. Not completely, not everywhere, but the version that mattered, the one that was part of the neighbourhood rather than adjacent to it, has mostly disappeared. What replaced it is more efficient in every measurable way and is missing the thing that made the original worth missing.

This is not a simple nostalgia argument. Nostalgia arguments are usually about feeling rather than function. The corner store argument is about function. The corner store did something that the convenience chain does not do, and what it did was hold the social fabric of a neighbourhood together in ways that nobody noticed until it was gone.

Becker’s

Becker’s was founded in Toronto in 1957 and expanded aggressively through Ontario over the following decades. At its peak, the chain had over six hundred locations, almost all of them in Ontario, and was as fundamental to the suburban landscape of the province as the subdivision itself. The stores were small. The selection was specific. Dairy, chips, pop, cigarettes, lottery tickets, penny candy in a box near the register. The lighting was fluorescent. The floors were linoleum. The whole experience was functional rather than aspirational, which was appropriate because the corner store was never about aspiration.

Becker’s was acquired and eventually converted to Mac’s in the late 1990s. The Becker’s name disappeared from Ontario by the end of the decade. People who grew up near a Becker’s still sometimes use the name for any convenience store, the way a generation of people still says Kleenex for any facial tissue. The name outlasted the stores because the stores were real places and real places leave marks.

Mac’s and the Consolidation

Mac’s Milk, which became Mac’s, was the dominant brand in western Canada and expanded eastward through the 1980s and 1990s. The chain was eventually acquired by Alimentation Couche-Tard, the Quebec-based company that has become one of the largest convenience store operators in the world. In 2018, most Canadian Mac’s locations were rebranded as Circle K, the international brand that Couche-Tard also operates.

The Circle K rebrand is exactly what it sounds like. A functional, internationally standardized convenience store that operates the same way in Canada as it does in the United States, Thailand, and Ireland. It is not a bad store. It sells the things you need when you need them. It does not know your name or your usual or the fact that you moved in three months ago and are still figuring out the neighbourhood.

The corner store did something the convenience chain cannot. It was part of the neighbourhood. The chain is adjacent to it.

The Independent Operators

Behind the franchise history is an older tradition that the franchise history eventually absorbed or displaced. The truly independent corner store, often run by immigrant families who had identified the format as a viable entry point into Canadian retail life. Chinese families, South Asian families, Portuguese families, Italian families, all of whom operated thousands of small neighbourhood shops across Canadian cities throughout the 20th century. These stores had personalities. Specific cheese selections that reflected the owner’s background. Candy choices that were not determined by a corporate planogram. A relationship with regular customers that lasted decades rather than the length of a staff rotation.

The economics of independence were always precarious. Margins were thin. Competition from grocery chains and then from big-box stores made thin margins thinner. The products that drove the most traffic, cigarettes and lottery tickets, declined as categories for different reasons over different timescales. The independent corner store became progressively harder to sustain, and one by one, they closed or sold or converted to franchise operations that were financially more stable and culturally less interesting.

What Got Lost

Sociologists have a term for places like the corner store. Third places. Neither home nor work, but the space where community happens informally. The barber shop. The diner. The pub. The corner store. What distinguishes third places from commercial transactions is the relationship between the person behind the counter and the people who come in. The corner store owner who knew your name, your usual, the fact that your kid had just started at the school down the street. The information exchanged was not important in isolation. Accumulated over years, it constituted knowing someone, which is a different thing.

The Circle K employee is not going to know your name. This is not a criticism of Circle K employees. It is a structural observation. The chain is designed for efficiency and consistency, which are genuine virtues, and they preclude the kind of relationship that the independent operator built over years of being in the same place with the same people. Something was optimized away when the corner stores closed. What was optimized away did not show up in any efficiency metric, which is why nobody noticed it was gone until it was already gone.

The penny candy is also gone, which is a smaller loss but a specific one. Swedish Berries. Fuzzy Peaches. Sour Keys. Cherry Blasters. You could spend a dollar on five items and the selection process was not casual. The candy still exists in bulk bins at grocery stores where you scoop it yourself and weigh it. This is not the same thing as choosing items one by one from a cardboard box while the owner of the store waits patiently. Everything still exists. The experience of it does not.

The Independently Owned Store

Behind the franchise history is an older tradition: the truly independent corner store, often run by immigrant families who had identified the corner store as a viable entry point into Canadian retail life. Chinese, South Asian, Portuguese, and Italian families operated thousands of small neighbourhood shops across Canada’s cities through the 20th century. These stores had personalities that no franchise could replicate — specific candy selections, particular cheeses or specialty items that reflected the owner’s background, relationships with regular customers that lasted decades.

The economics of these stores were always precarious. Margins on cigarettes and lottery tickets, which drove much of the traffic, were slim. Competition from grocery chains and then from big-box stores squeezed prices on everything else. As the anchor products — cigarettes especially — declined due to health campaigns and then plain tax economics, the independent corner store model became harder and harder to sustain.

What Made Them Matter

The corner store performed a function that economists call “third place” — a place that is neither home nor work, where community happens informally. The person behind the counter knew your name, knew your usual, sometimes knew your family. You ran into neighbours. You found out that the school had closed because of snow. You learned that the family down the street had a new baby. These small transactions of information and familiarity were not the reason anyone went to the corner store, but they were what made it part of the neighbourhood’s social fabric.

The big-box stores and the franchise chains that replaced corner stores are more efficient in almost every measurable way. They’re cheaper, better stocked, more consistently staffed. What they don’t have is the cat near the register or the owner who’s been there for thirty years and knows without asking that you want your cigarettes in a bag. Whether that matters depends on how you think about what a neighbourhood is and what a community needs. Most of us don’t think about it until it’s gone.

The penny candy is gone too, by the way. Everything cost at least a dollar by the time most corner stores closed, and now you can’t find a Swedish Berry for less than a few bucks in a bag at the bulk store. The experience of spending your whole allowance on individual candies selected with great deliberation from a box near the register is, like the corner store itself, mostly a memory now. A specifically Canadian one.

A generation of Canadian kids grew up with a very specific set of experiences that have now almost entirely disappeared. Not the experiences themselves exactly, but the texture of them, the particular way they felt, the combination of boredom and anticipation and specific smells that cannot be adequately described to someone who was not there. This is an attempt to describe them anyway.

These are not the important things. The important things were the people and the years and whatever was happening in your specific house on your specific street. But the unimportant things are what nostalgia is made of. Here are twelve of them.

Canadian Tire Money

Canadian Tire money was introduced in 1958 but reached its cultural peak in the 1990s, when every Canadian household had a drawer or a shoebox or an elastic-banded stack of the stuff accumulating. It was printed to look almost exactly like real Canadian currency, which in retrospect seems either charming or alarming depending on your perspective on financial regulation. You received it with cash purchases at Canadian Tire and were theoretically supposed to spend it on future Canadian Tire purchases. In practice almost nobody spent it. The fantasy was that someday the hoard would be large enough to buy something genuinely useful. Most of it eventually got thrown out during a move.

The YTV After-School Lineup

Before streaming, before on-demand, before anyone had figured out that children could watch whatever they wanted whenever they wanted, the YTV after-school lineup was a fixed point. You came home, you turned on the television, and the schedule told you what was on. Are You Afraid of the Dark was genuinely scary in ways that felt appropriate for children but probably were not. The Hilarious House of Frightenstein was bizarre public access energy that somehow survived into syndication. Animorphs looked terrible even then and was compelling anyway. The tone was distinctly Canadian in ways that were hard to articulate. Slightly weird. Low budget in a way that felt intentional. More willing to be strange than American children’s television typically was.

Zellers

Zellers occupied a specific emotional register that no Canadian retailer has managed to recreate. It was not Kmart, which felt American and somehow wrong. It was not the Bay, which felt formal. It was exactly mid, in the most Canadian possible way. Slightly tired fluorescent lighting. A restaurant inside where the grilled cheese was fine. A smell that was specific and recognizable and impossible to describe except by saying it smelled like Zellers. When Target Canada took over most of the locations in 2013, spent two years failing spectacularly, and closed, the collective Canadian response was a particular kind of vindicated sadness. Nobody was surprised. Everyone felt something.

The Sears Wish Book

The Sears Wish Book arrived in autumn and was treated with the gravity of a sacred text. You sat with it for an hour and circled what you wanted with a ballpoint pen, updating the circles as your preferences changed, negotiating internally about which single item you could reasonably ask for and which represented pure fantasy. The catalogue had specific physical qualities, the weight of it, the slightly waxy pages, the particular smell of mass-produced colour printing, that made the act of going through it feel like an event rather than a task. Sears Canada went bankrupt in 2017. The Wish Book, which had been published in some form since 1953, died with it.

The CNE

The Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto was the official end of summer for generations of Ontario kids. The rides were not safe-looking. The food was objectively bad and consumed in quantities that guaranteed a difficult afternoon. There was always a building full of agricultural exhibits that adults pretended to find interesting. The Super Dogs were the one universally loved element. The grandstand show featured musicians who were recognizable but had not had a recent hit, which made them accessible in a way that current artists were not. Going to the CNE felt like being somewhere real was happening, even when nothing was.

The Hockey Night in Canada Theme Song

Dolores Claman wrote it in 1968 for three hundred dollars. When the CBC lost the rights to it in 2008 because of a contract dispute, and TSN bought it, the reaction from Canadians was something between grief and fury. The CBC commissioned a replacement through a public competition. The replacement is fine. It is perfectly adequate. It is not the same and everyone who grew up hearing the original knows it is not the same and has accepted this while never fully making peace with it.

The Video Store on Friday Night

The Friday video store trip had a grammar to it. You drove to Rogers Video or the independently owned place with the handwritten signs. You wanted something specific. That specific thing was always rented. You spent twenty minutes choosing a compromise from the Previously Viewed section. You bought microwave popcorn from the rack by the register. The whole process was inefficient and time-consuming and almost everyone who experienced it remembers it with more warmth than the outcome warranted.

Clearly Canadian

Clearly Canadian sparkling water came in a distinctive rounded bottle and flavours called things like Wild Cherry and Country Raspberry. It cost enough that you did not get one every day, which made getting one feel like an event. It was available at the corner store and represented a specific tier of childhood luxury, below pop in everyday availability but above nothing. The brand went bankrupt in 2009, was revived by demand from people who remembered it, and is technically available today. Finding one now feels archaeological.

Calling Your Friend’s House and Talking to Their Parents

Before personal cell phones, you called a family’s landline. The family’s landline belonged to the family. This meant you regularly had to navigate a brief conversation with your friend’s parents before reaching your friend. This required saying hello, identifying yourself, and being politely brief. It was considered a normal social skill. It is now a lost one.

MuchMusic

MuchMusic was Canadian, Toronto-based, independently weird, and governed by CanCon regulations that required a percentage of Canadian content. This meant you knew who the Tragically Hip were and who Alanis Morissette was and who Sloan was whether you sought them out or not. The VJs were genuine personalities. The studio opened onto Queen Street. The slow, depressing drift toward generic pop content in the 2000s was visible in real time to anyone paying attention. The channel still exists as Much. It is not the same channel.

Minor Hockey Culture

If you played or watched minor hockey in Canada in the 1990s, you know the cold arena smell. Ice and rubber mats and coffee from the canteen. Parents in the stands who were fully aware they were taking it too seriously and could not stop. A Thermos of hot chocolate. The snowsuit that you wore until you were inside and then immediately complained about because you were too hot. This has not entirely disappeared but something about the specific intensity of it has shifted in ways that are hard to name.

Penny Candy

The candy selection at the corner store in the 1990s was its own world. Swedish Berries. Fuzzy Peaches. Cherry Blasters. Sour Keys. You could spend a dollar on five items and the selection process was not casual. The candy itself was too sweet in ways that modern confectionery has somewhat corrected, and occasionally had textures that defied description. Getting it meant going to a specific store, talking to a specific person, making specific choices. The candy still exists in bulk bins at grocery stores. The experience of getting it does not.

5. Going to the CNE or the PNE and Thinking It Was the Most Exciting Place on Earth

The Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto or the Pacific National Exhibition in Vancouver — depending on which side of the country you grew up on — was an annual pilgrimage. The rides were slightly terrifying. The food was objectively terrible and irresistible. There was always a building full of agricultural exhibits that adults pretended to care about. The butter sculpture. The Super Dogs. The grandstand shows that featured musicians who were just past their peak. If you grew up in Ontario, the CNE was simply a fixture — the official end of summer, the last gasp before school started, the place where you ate a corn dog and rode the Flyer and felt vaguely sick for the rest of the afternoon.

6. Listening to the Hockey Night in Canada Theme and Feeling Something

The original Hockey Night in Canada theme, composed by Dolores Claman in 1968, was the second national anthem. Every Saturday night, it announced the beginning of something important. When CBC lost the rights to the theme in 2008 — in a messy dispute that ended with TSN buying it — it felt like a small national tragedy. The CBC commissioned a new theme through a public competition. It’s fine. It’s perfectly adequate. It’s not the same.

7. Renting a Movie From the Video Store on a Friday Night

The Friday night video store trip was a ritual with a specific grammar. You drove to Rogers Video or Jumbo Video or a locally owned shop with a handwritten sign. You wandered the aisles. You couldn’t find what you actually wanted because it was all out. You settled for something from the “Previously Viewed” section. You got a bag of microwave popcorn from the rack near the register. The whole experience took forty-five minutes and was somehow deeply satisfying. The last Rogers Video closed in 2011. The locally owned stores had mostly been gone for years by then.

8. Drinking Clearly Canadian Like It Was a Special Occasion

Clearly Canadian sparkling water, in its distinctive rounded bottle, occupied a strange position in the ’90s beverage landscape — too fancy for everyday consumption, not quite fancy enough to actually be considered upscale. It came in flavors like Wild Cherry and Country Raspberry and Orchard Peach, and drinking one felt slightly sophisticated in a way that a juice box didn’t. It was available at the Mac’s Milk or the Becker’s on the corner, and it cost enough that you didn’t get one every day. That made it special. The brand went bankrupt in 2009, was revived by nostalgic demand, and is technically available again today — but finding one feels like an archaeological discovery.

9. Calling a Friend’s House and Talking to Their Parents First

Before everyone had a cell phone, you called a landline. The landline belonged to the family, not the individual. This meant you regularly had to speak to your friend’s parents before you could speak to your friend — a social exercise that required a minimum of politeness and the ability to say “Hello, is [Name] there please?” without sounding like a complete idiot. This was considered normal. It prepared you, in small ways, for interacting with adults. It is now a lost art.

10. Watching MuchMusic Instead of Music Videos Online

MuchMusic was Canadian, independently programmed, and genuinely weird in ways that MTV never quite managed. The VJs were real personalities. The studio was open to the street in Toronto. They played Canadian content because CanCon regulations required it, which meant you knew who the Tragically Hip were whether you wanted to or not. The shift to a generic pop format in the 2000s was slow and depressing to watch. MuchMusic still technically exists, rebranded as Much, but the original version — chaotic, Canadian, playing Sloan and the Hip and Alanis Morissette on a Saturday afternoon — is long gone.

11. Understanding the Unspoken Rules of the Hockey Arena

If you grew up playing or watching minor hockey in Canada in the ’90s, you understood a set of unwritten rules that nobody ever explained but everyone knew. You brought a Thermos of hot chocolate. You wore your snowsuit until you got inside and then immediately complained about being too hot. The parents in the stands took it entirely too seriously and were entirely aware that they were taking it too seriously and couldn’t stop. The smell of a cold arena rink — the ice, the rubber, the coffee from the canteen — is one of the most recognizably Canadian sensory experiences that exists, and it hasn’t changed. But something about the culture around it has.

12. Buying Penny Candy at the Corner Store

The corner store candy selection in the ’90s was a world unto itself. Swedish Berries. Fuzzy Peaches. Cherry Blasters. Sour Keys. You could get five things for a dollar and spend twenty minutes deciding which five. The candy was often slightly too sweet and occasionally had a texture that defied description. Some of it came in paper bags that the owner filled by hand. The stores themselves — Becker’s, Mac’s, the independently owned shops with hand-lettered signs and a cat sleeping near the register — are mostly gone now, replaced by convenience chains or closed entirely. The candy still exists, technically. But getting it requires a trip to a bulk store, which is not the same experience at all.

None of these things were objectively great. Canadian Tire money was a marketing gimmick. Zellers was fine. The corner store was just a store. But they were shared — experienced by millions of Canadian kids across a specific decade in a specific country — and that shared quality is what made them matter. When they went, they took a particular texture of childhood with them. That’s always how it goes.