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Convenience

Bossman’s Corner Shop

Marlpit Boulevard, Plot R4

Inside a corner shop: the shopkeeper in a red polo shirt behind the counter, cigarette pigeonholes on the wall behind him, two drinks chillers, and shelves of brightly packaged own-brand groceries.

The shop on the corner, and the one the street actually uses. A three-storey corner building with a red shopfront, BOSS MAN in white on blue fascias over both frontages, the door set across the corner, and a sign round the side that reads VAPES FAGS BOOZE, two out of three of which are in stock. There are thirty-eight bits of litter on the pavement outside at the last count.

A corner shop in a red-brick building, BOSS MAN in white on blue fascias above red window frames, the shopkeeper visible through the window and litter scattered on the pavement outside.
BOSS MAN, on the corner, with the door on the angle the way corner shops always had it.

Inside it is six metres by not quite six, and every bit of it is working. Five shelf units round the walls, a double-sided island down the middle with crisps on one side and nuts on the other, two chillers, and the counter, with two displays of chocolate in front of it and the cigarettes behind: a hundred packets in twenty-four pigeonholes.

Five hundred and sixty-eight things on the shelves, a hundred and thirty-nine different lines, and they are not arranged at random. The dear things sit at eye level, the cheap things live down by your ankles, the priciest cigarettes are on the top row of the rack, and the tall bottles of vodka and wine have been moved up to the top shelf of the booze because it is the only one with the headroom.

Nearly all of it is Boss Man’s own brand: Premium Bake Beans, London Fog Stew, and a Whole Cheese Drink that takes some explaining. One chiller is soft drinks, the other is milk and cheese, and the tobacco is very nearly the only thing on the premises that comes from anybody else.

Two glass-fronted chillers, one full of bottled soft drinks and the other of milk and cheese, beside a counter with a small radio on it.
Soft drinks on the left, milk and cheese on the right, and Boss Man’s name on nearly all of it.

The man behind the counter keeps a radio on it, turned to face him rather than you and tuned to Oakhaven FM. Thirteen of the regulars call in on the way home from work, most of them around half past five, and he watches them come and go.

A small radio with its aerial up on a shop counter, shelves of own-brand jars, bread and cleaning products behind it.
Oakhaven FM, turned to face the man behind the counter.

Every tin and bottle in here was designed for the game, down to the Whole Cheese Drink: a British corner shop stocked shelf by shelf, in a British life sim.

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