WHERE HIPSTERS GO TO SHOP
The general store returns, with an artisanal flare.
On a hot day last July, I found myself at the tail end of a fruitless lastminute gift hunt, peering into an unfamiliar storefront. Ceramics. Prints. Canvas totes. “Yes,” I thought, a parched traveller before her mirage. The sign by the door read, “Opening day!” Perfect timing.
The store was Likely General, on Roncesvalles Avenue in Toronto. A modern day general store, its shelves are stocked with highly covetable, well-designed goods, from hand-loomed napkins (by artist Amanda Rataj) to intriguing dark bottles labelled “Sex Oil” (a creation from Province Apothecary, a local skin care brand). Its tagline: “Everything in general, nothing in particular.”
It was my first general store, and I was instantly charmed.
The notion of a general store calls to mind a bygone era — I think of them in black and white, with dilapidated signs, uneven wooden shelves and the smell of tin cans. Since they predate supermarkets and their origins are, for the most part, rural, my relationship to general stores was mythic, built on sentimentality for quaint oldtimeyness. But general stores no longer belong to the past and small towns. In the year since I walked into Likely General, modern reincarnations seem to be everywhere: variety stores, specialty goods shops, mercantile. It’s a wisp of dusty cultural nostalgia grounded in a shiny new business model. But why the fixation on bygones?
“I liked the idea of an old-time general store,” explains Scott Meleskie, who opened Clark Street Merchantile in Montreal in 2013, “A place where a customer can go [and] speak with the ‘shopkeep’ to explain what they wanted.” When it comes to what the modern day general stores have inherited from their predecessors, a salient point is human expertise: knowing a product’s history, how it’s made, what goes into the process.
Through careful curation and dedicated customer service, modern general stores owners are pitting themselves against the one-click purchases and anonymous reviews of mass (e-) commerce, offering consumers, instead, an old-fashioned relationship to our goods: the tangibility of a brickand-mortar, and the knowledge that the person standing across the counter has tested it first. “Our biggest motivator is to provide value and an experience to our customers,” says Gareth Lukes, owner of Lukes General Store (with locations in Vancouver and Calgary). The goal is to share knowledge through trial, “not just what some blog or Top 10 list is saying.”
Even more crucial is the element of sociability. “I always loved the sense of community that those places had,” says Walter Manning, co-founder of Old Faithful Shop in Vancouver, who comes from a lineage of general stores owners. “People picked up items for daily life, but grabbed a sense of belonging too.” Lisa Davies, who co-owns The Uncommons shop in Calgary with friends and family, echoes his sentiment: “Uncommon to us means really bringing back a sense of intention to the goods we use, enjoy and appreciate,” she explains. “Generally, that translates to a rediscovery of design or craft and reconnecting with the people involved in the process.”
This sense of community not only defines these stores’ relationships with their customers, but is inherent in the very model of how they do business with creators — an increasingly successful one at that. “Independent merchants really help to define the fabric of a community,” Davies explains. “It’s those shared threads that make for an increasingly viable model.” When I talked to Brooke Manning, owner of Likely General, she shared a similar philosophy — that a close-knit relationship with the makers featured in her store contributes to its vitality. “A general store, to me, in this decade, is a place where community can thrive and artists and makers are always at the forefront,” she says. “A place where craftsmanship, longevity, and the ideals of supporting the handmade are crucial.”
‘People picked up items for daily life, but grabbed a sense of belonging, too’
Craftsmanship, quality, value, experience — these are the tenets of the modern general store vocabulary. But with this philosophy comes a certain price tag, one that deterred most consumers from artisanal, handmade goods in the first place. This raises the question — how do we reconcile the offerings of traditional general stores (staple food items and run of the mill household supplies) with the luxurious goods supplied by their modern counterparts (handcrafted leather wallets, smallbatch colognes, $300 wool blankets)?
According to Manning, that’s a misconception, and she challenges me to see it differently. “Buying something that has been made with care by the hands of the artist/ maker not only supports them by putting money directly into their pocket,“she says, “But it also supports and perpetuates the importance of their trade — it exercises responsible consumerism, and takes money away from fast-fashion and industries that are creating an enormous amount of problems within our consumer culture.” Fair. After all, handmade goods are not de facto a luxury, but simply a different consumer model, one dwarfed and rarefied by urbanization, supercentres, mass marketing.
It is in this landscape that modern general stores put down their stakes: a quest for quality and commitment to craft in an otherwise disposable world. In the hearts of alienated cities, they are carving out havens — building a sense of community, a return to the small, one handmade item at a time.