What do people in your area/region call a mom and pop convenience store?

35 comments

1. Gas station, convenience store, maybe corner store. Maybe just by the name of the store.

2. Gas station or ‘corner store’, most likely. Or whatever the name of the business is.

3. convenience store or corner store. Or gas station if it’s a gas station.

4. Liquor store

5. Bodegas

6. I’m from Michigan (metro Detroit) and call them Party Stores. I have no idea what they call them here in Arizona; I honestly haven’t been in one in the 11 years I’ve lived here.

7. They’re *bodegas*, mostly.

8. We don’t have like we used to in the 1970s but a “corner store” but on the sign they were often called a variety store. We sorta didn’t have a real name for then weirdly.

   Every neighborhood had a little store and the owners lived upstairs.

   They had zero parking. Customers were just moms with no car or us kids that had to run and get cigarettes and some chops and macaroni salad.

9. People call it a gas station even if they don’t sell gas

10. Corner store/convenience store. Just a few miles north and you start hearing Bodega. Growing up on SI they were bodegas

11. Corner store

12. I’d use “mom and pop convenience store” to describe a convenience store that’s not part of a chain. Often they’ll have made-to-order sandwiches, which 7-11 stores, at least in my area, don’t have (other than sometimes hot dogs).

    I’m familiar with bodega, but I think it’s relatively new in usage. I’d never heard of it growing up in NYC.

13. As opposed to one that’s corporately owned, like a 7-11? I’m not aware of a special name for those.

14. My students call it “the liquor”

15. Corner store, mom and pop, locally owned are the three I hear the most.

16. A Quick Store.

17. Corner store.

18. We didn’t have a specific name. They were usually referred to by the family name, like Smith’s store, or Jones Quick Shop.

19. Whatever the name of the store is.

    I called gas stations stores quickie marts.

20. Simply “the store”.

21. Convenience store.

22. Convenience stores in chicago

23. Mom and Pop shop

24. A mom and pop convenience store.

25. Extinct.

26. Whatever the store is called (Cumby’s, Stewart’s). We don’t have too many non-chain ones around here. Maybe “mini-mart”?

27. Quik-E-Mart, but then I may just know a lot of simpsons fans

28. The stab and grab

29. The Quickie Mart

30. Philadelphia- Corner store.

31. Either the name of the store or just convenient store. Some of the old timers in my arrea just say “Junior Food Store”.

32. Corner store or Papi Store

33. New England: corner store, convenience store, or (especially/exclusively liquor stores) the packie.

    Packie is short for package, as liquor stores exploited a loophole regarding sale of alcohol in its original package.

    It’s often said it’s because Massachusetts required brown bags to conceal the alcohol, but that’s a folk etymology.

    Recently I’ve heard people say it’s a derogatory tern since many convenience stores are owned or run by Pakistani and Indian people, but thankfully that’s not the case.

    https://patch.com/massachusetts/boston/only-massachusetts-why-liquor-store-called-packie

34. This just reminded me of a horrible memory of 911, so I decided to make another post. Both my husband and I immediately raced to our corner store in the days it happened to check on the owners. One thing that they did was put the wives on the register. It sounds empowering, and it was, in a way. I know that I certainly hugged Fatima after a long day, but, even in Berkeley, it was a long day on 9/12. She was just a Palestinian mom trying to make a life for her family. She was just another Muslim living in the diaspora.

    It wasn’t her fight. She hated bin laden as much as we all did.

35. Papi store, Bodega, or corner store. From SEPA