Going to the dep

Corner stores have always fascinated me. I’m amazed by their adaptability and the way they change from one city to the next, from the Arabes du coin in Paris to the bodegas of New York and the tiny and astoundingly ubiquitous si doh of Hong Kong. Despite the fundamentally similar services they provide, corner stores exist in markedly different social, economic and cultural contexts around the world.

Montreal’s depanneurs are a very nice example. With 1,127 on the island, most of them independent and owner-operated, we have a pretty unique local convenience store culture that has evolved over the past few decades. Being able to sell alcohol gives deps a huge advantage over corner stores in other Canadian cities; Montreal’s high population density and provincial laws regulating beer prices and store opening hours also pay depanneurs a big favour. In Saturday’s Gazette, I examined the economic and social side of the depanneur trade, with one article discussing overall trends in the industry and another that takes a close look at the owners of two Park Avenue depanneurs.

Depanneurs are the most local of businesses—they serve a market that often consists of less than a thousand people and ranges for just a few blocks—but they’re also profoundly global, since they are mostly owned and staffed by immigrants, many of whom have arrived in Canada only recently. There are nine depanneurs within a five-minute walk of my apartment. One is owned by a North African man and is often crowded with men who use it as a social club; two more are owned by Greek families and the rest are run by recent immigrants from mainland China.

What makes the depanneur trade so appealing to immigrants is that it is easy to enter and easy to exit: you don’t need much money to buy a depanneur and, if you ever decide to move on, it’s easy to sell. When I spoke to Jimmy Wang, the mild-mannered owner of the dep closest to my apartment, he told me that he was a computer engineer in a city near Beijing before he moved to Canada. He had no illusions about being able to work in his field once he came — he just wanted his future children to be raised in a stable country with a social safety net. (He now has one daughter, who was born shortly after he arrived in 2004.) Eventually, he plans to sell his store and perhaps invest in another business.

This approach isn’t necessarily shared by all depanneur owners; some use their store as a springboard to something larger and more ambitious. In Park Extension, many depanneurs sell meat and produce; in Verdun, which has a growing Chinese community, many depanneurs double as Chinese grocery stores, allowing them to capture two markets at once: the usual beer-cigarettes-and-lottery customers as well as people looking for fresh choi and fish sauce. In Ahuntsic, there’s even a depanneur sushi bar. I didn’t cover this angle in my Gazette stories, but it’s something that deserves further exploration.

Delivery is something else I didn’t have a chance to look at. Although fewer and fewer depanneurs actually provide home delivery service anymore, those that do still send out their deliverymen on special three-wheeled bikes that can hold up to 300 lbs. of weight in their front baskets. I love seeing these bikes go by loaded with cases of beer and other assorted junk, but, like credit, they might be fading away into depanneur history.