International
'Corner shops' fall on hard days
By Hasan Suroor
LONDON, JAN. 5. The ubiquitous ``corner shop'', the most visible public face of Asian enterprise and business ethic in Britain for decades, has fallen on hard days partly because of the competition from neighbourhood supermarket chains, but more importantly because of the changing attitudes of the second generation Asians whose career ambitious are less modest than those of their parents.
The number of such shops across Britain has fallen by 25 per cent in the past decade, from 15,000 to less than 12,000, and the decline is expected to continue as younger Asians, more educated and professionally better equipped than their parents, say they don't want to spend their lives slogging their guts out for small returns. ``Young people are saying: I'm not going to work 16 hours a day in a corner shop for peanuts and get all the abuse from people who are no better than me and in some cases not as good as me,'' Prof. David McEvoy of Liverpool John Moores University told a conference on Friday.
He said the first generation which arrived from Africa, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh had little education and modest goals. Their only asset was their capacity for hard work and enterprise - and they intended to return home one day having made enough money. They believed the sacrifices they were making were worth it. The younger generation, born and brought up in Britain, does not suffer from the ``myth of return'' and sees no reason why it should not aspire for a better future like any other Briton. ``There has been a rejection of the immigrant work ethic and the myth of return among the younger generation, and they're taking advantage of the new opportunities that are available to them in the labour market,'' Prof. McEvoy said pointing out that the young Asians today were more likely to go into professions, or run more upwardly mobile businesses.
``I don't think I'll be following in my dad's footsteps. There is a lot of hard work and effort involved in what he has achieved. I have helped out in the shop from a young age, as have most second generation children but it gets a bit tiresome and now there are a lot of other opportunities,'' twentytwo-year-old Sameer Jadeja, a university graduate, told a newspaper. His father, Mahendra Jadeja, who arrived here from Gujarat in 1977, said he still got up at 3 a.m. to start a 15-hour day running a chain of ``corner'' shops.
Besides individual enterprise, one reason for the success of corner shops which sell everything from newspapers to grocery and booze was that they came up when big supermarkets and petrol stations did not serve inner city neighbourhoods.
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