I discovered this morning, only partly to my surprise, that neither Merriam-Webster nor the Oxford English Dictionary has an entry for candy store. I think there should be one, because candy store does not always denote a store that sells only candy. It’s not an obvious compound. My try at a definition, subject to adjustment:
can·dy store \ ˈkan-dē-ˈstȯr \ n : an urban retail establishment usu. selling candy, chewing gum, lottery tickets, magazines, newspapers, novelties, tobacco products, and stationery, often with a soda fountain attachedAm I missing anything?
All the candy stores
4417 New Utrecht Avenue : 4417 New Utrecht Avenue, again : 4302 12th Avenue : 4319 13th Avenue : 4213 or 4215 Fort Hamilton Parkway : 4223 Fort Hamilton Parkway : 94 Nassau Street
comments: 9
Suggested revision: an urban
Oops — thanks, Joe.
Of course it's a US-English-only definition - over here we'd call it a sweet shop... :)
At least sometimes here, too. The New Jersey suburb my family moved to when I was a kid had a “sweet shop” (still there) that fit (still fits) my definition.
I thought of adding chiefly American, but when I looked up distinctively American words in Webster’s Third, I found they were unmarked as such.
Might another British-English equivalent be newsagent? I found a Quora discussion about whether newsagents sold candy and snacks. The designation CTN — confectionery, tobacco, news — sounds just like a candy store.
Newsagent? Not really, though there is a high degree of overlap, It's also true that many newsagents in the older sense have disappeared over the years. My first paid job was delivering papers for a newsagent / corner store near my parents' home, and even all those years ago newspaper delivery was a marginal activity, serving only to attract customers into your shop. Plus the fact it automatically led to antisocial working hours so as to get papers into the hands of readers before they left for work. With the shifts in how we collectively consume news today, very few such shops are left, and the newspaper trade, such as remains, has largely been absorbed by other retailers.
Here in the village of Grasmere the one and only newsagent still exists as a shop, but no longer sells papers, concentrating instead on stationery, toys, some sweets, and a random collection of useful things that are hard to get elsewhere.
So yes, newsagents sell some sweets, but then so do many other retailers, typically placed by the till for the easier seduction of young children shopping with a parent. But for a place to be called a sweet shop then in my book that has to be its primary activity, not a little sideline. The word conjures up rows of screw-top bottles with the contents sold by the ounce (or these days, by the 100g) and a kind of pick-n-mix trade. A lot of those shops have also fallen by the wayside, but enough still remain that they deserve a collective noun!
Ah — so a sweet shop there is something quite different from what I know as the American urban “candy store,” where the candy is just a display near the register (to avoid theft) and the business is about much more than candy.
It interests me to learn of newspaper delivery that involved a corner store. Nothing like that in the States that I know of.
A rabbit hole I’m not going down, at least not right now: I suspect that the candy store as I knew long ago began to give way to the bodega.
https://centroca.hunter.cuny.edu/Browse/objects/facet/centro_keyword/id/298/view/images/key/bbdcfc9cd07f3b099917c3e792cefb2b
Yes, many young kids of my generation and older did a paper round and hence became paper boys or (though very much in the minority) paper girls. Those were in the days when parents didn't mind their 8-12 year-old children being out in the early morning on their own traipsing round houses!
The rounds themselves followed, naturally, our own peculiarly winding roads and not your grid-based ones, so the first thing you had to do was sort out an efficient way of getting round the houses in question. Complicated by the fact that the number of houses who actually had papers from the newsagent in question was comparatively small, so you ended up going down odd cul-de-sacs to deliver maybe one or two papers at the far end.
I enjoyed it, and stayed doing it longer than many others - basically until I realised that the money you earned was kind of peanuts for the effort involved!
Thanks for the bodegas, Anon.
And thanks for the account of delivery, Richard. Here, newspaper delivery is pretty much always in the hands of grownups, sometimes with the help of kids. I know from someone who managed subscriptions for a nearby paper that there’s a lot of turnover.
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