From Heritage New Zealand, Summer 2010

by Matt Philp

The local grocer and the corner dairy hold special places in thiscountry's social heritage

On the morning of the earthquake in Christchurch, Suresh Patel arrived early at his Hoon Hay dairy and found panicky locals queued at the door. The Eftpos was down and few had cash, so Suresh took his regular customers on trust, urging them to stock up on batteries, water and other essentials and repay him when they could.

That generous gesture made headlines. But it also says something about the place of the corner dairy in our communities. For those rattled Hoon Hay people, finding the dairy open would have been a reassuringly familiar event. And for the shopkeeper, trusting his customers was instinctive. “We all rely on each other,” says Suresh, who has owned the P&P Dairy with his wife Geta for nine years.

Of course, it’s easy to over-sentimentalise. The corner dairy is a business, selling milk and sweeties but also products which have put it in the thick of various political skirmishes over such perceived social ills as porn and tobacco, the latter making up a hefty percentage of the modern-day dairy’s profit.

Earlier this year suspicions were raised that a newly established organisation supposedly representing dairy owners was really a front for tobacco companies to lobby against stricter control for cigarette displays.

None of that, however, necessarily detracts from the place of the dairy in our collective memory. For many of us, among our earliest experiences of  independence and responsibility will have been the Saturday morning walk down to the corner to buy a packet of smokes or the paper for our parents, with the understanding that we could spend the change as we liked.

Dairies, which really hit their high water line in the 1970s, were landmarks on the walk home from school, a setting for early experiments in crime (this writer can still remember being “shopped” to his parents by  a canny dairy owner after trying to cash the proceeds from a fake Scout neighbourhood bottle run). For a kid, dairies were where all that maths you were learning at school suddenly made sense.

Dairies crop up in New Zealand arts and letters, although admittedly less often than pubs. The kids in Taika Waititi’s film Boy are drawn towards a dairy, pulled by sugary emanations as surely as metal filings to a magnet. Playwright Jacob Rajan interwove the famous Indian love story of the Taj Mahal with the lives of two Indian immigrants to New Zealand among the high-stacked shelves of Krishnan’s Dairy. And who knows whether Lynley Dodd started out with the name of the dog or its provenance when she first conceived her famous children’s story?

It’s a very New Zealand thing, the use of the word “dairy” to mean a corner store. The Te Ara online Encylopedia of New Zealand explains that the term began as “dairy produce sellers” and that for a while these were the only shops allowed to sell milk, cream, cheese, butter and eggs. (For many years they were also the only stores allowed to open on Sundays.) 

“The term ‘dairy’ only became commonly applied to small grocery stores from the late 1930s,” reads the entry in Te Ara. “Before then a small shop selling groceries would have been called a ‘cash grocer’. In 1945 a law was passed that put an end to most grocers opening on Saturdays. Dairies, however, were allowed to be open outside of normal trading hours (Saturdays and in the evenings). They also expanded their range of goods – although there was a list of goods they were legally allowed to sell outside normal trading hours.” Whatever advantages dairies once enjoyed, however, have been thoroughly reversed by deregulation and the arrival of new forms of competition. The threat hasn’t come only from the spread of supermarkets after the 1950s; although dairies lost some business, it was the grocery stores that felt the brunt of that development.

But as supermarkets have extended both their opening hours and their offerings to include more convenience items, they’ve chipped away at the last of the dairy’s native advantages. Meanwhile, the retail space has become increasingly crowded with superettes, minimarts, chain-operated convenience stores and petrol station food courts, all of which are able to call on better resources and buying power than the humble family-owned dairy.

Tim Morris, of retail market analyst Coriolis Research, says retail formats are constantly being replaced by new ones. (You can pin the demise of both the tobacconist and the confectionery shop at least in part on the dairy.) But he adds that while the turnover-per-unit of the dairy has dwindled, he isn’t yet willing to write its epitaph. “There was a massive crunch in the number of dairies at one stage, but the numbers now are either flat or even up a little.” For a start, the barriers to entry are low; that’s one reason why many new immigrants open dairies.

Dairies also tend to be well situated and, as in real estate, location in retail can be king. Social trends are also playing in their favour. An ageing population will benefit retailers located closer to the home, while the increase of women in the workforce and the pressured pace of modern life favour the kind of timesaving convenience that is the dairy’s stock in trade.

Tim says that while the names used might differ from country to country, the basic concept embodied in the corner dairy is international. “There is a permanent, universal demand by humans for a small convenience offer. I want some cigarettes, I want a cold drink, I want a candy bar or a newspaper, and I want to be able to walk to get it. That demand isn’t dying anywhere.”

Opening a dairy was never a ticket to wealth. Naturally there are exceptions, but mostly they don’t make profits by way of vast mark-ups; the premium you pay at the dairy tends more to reflect the fact that small operators don’t have anything like the same buying leverage as supermarkets. Rather, they produce profits only because of the exhaustive hours worked by their owners. That’s another reason why so many dairies are owned and operated by immigrants. Te Ara cites a 1994 study which found that of 269 dairies in central and suburban Auckland, 227 were owned by Indian families.

Suresh Patel says he opened his first dairy after emigrating from India – he’s owned five at various times including the one in Hoon Hay – because it promised a better future for his family than if he’d worked for a wage. But that requires being open seven days a week and, when you factor in restocking and tidying up, working 14-hour days. Not that he’s complaining. Since his Bachelor of Commerce days back in India it’s been his dream to own his own business. He enjoys the close relationship he has with his customers and the immediate community. “I like  to know everybody. You need to smile, to talk to your customers and look after them.”

Colin Johnson, owner of Johnson’s grocery in Colombo Street, Christchurch, would no doubt agree. As the name suggests, Johnson’s is more of a neighbourhood grocery store than a corner dairy, but what a store and what a heritage – it will celebrate its 100th anniversary next year. To walk into the store is to be transported back to at least the 1950s. Behind the counter, dressed in a traditional white grocer’s coat and totting up items on the back of a brown paper bag, you’ll find Colin, whose father owned the store before him. And towering over him, shelves – dozens of them,  so many and so closely packed as to almost defy belief. (The store was “knee deep” in stock after the recent earthquake, but thankfully suffered few breakages.)

To help the business survive, Colin has concentrated on stocking speciality lines, the sorts of thing people can’t find anywhere else, so his customers tend to come from all over Christchurch. Yet his regulars still seem to have that sense of ownership associated with the neighbourhood corner dairy. Colin says that after the earthquake his phone hardly stopped ringing. “You wouldn’t believe the number of calls I had from people just wanting to see if everything was all right.”

The corner store still has that familiar pull for us.