Dep City: Montreal’s Convenience Stores

If Montreal seems saturated with dépanneurs, that’s because it is: 1,127 crowd the island, about one for every 1,500 people. Since they emerged in their current form in the 1970s, the descendants of tobacconists and once-ubiquitous corner grocery stores, dépanneurs have become an inextricable part of life in Montreal.

They also are an important but often overlooked aspect of the city’s economy. For business owners, many of whom are immigrants, dépanneurs represent a rare field of work that poses virtually no barrier to entry, aside from a relatively small amount of capital.

“An immigrant arrives in this country with a degree, with skills, but cannot find a job because he doesn’t have Canadian experience,” said Bakr Ibrahim, a professor at Concordia’s John Molson School of Business who specializes in small business and ethnic entrepreneurship. “For one reason or another, he cannot gain employment in mainstream (fields), so the first thing he knows is to start a business on his own.” Increasingly, however, independent dépanneurs are under pressure from corporate convenience-store chains and from supermarkets, so the independent operators need to be ever more nimble and attuned to the market they serve, which can be as small as a few blocks.

For example, Yodh Ubhi, who owns a dépanneur on Park Ave. in Mile End, has begun selling “heat and eat” Indian food made by Aliments Nutrifresh Ltd., a prepared-food supplier based in St. Laurent. He said the move was based on requests from customers who had travelled to Toronto and noticed many convenience stores there served prepared food.

In some neighbourhoods, dépanneurs have expanded their offering by selling fruits and vegetables, meat and ethnic products. That’s the case in Park Extension, said Ubhi, who has lived there since the early 1980s. “There’s very cutthroat competition” in that area, he said, adding that South Asians who operate dépanneurs know the competition’s prices because “they go to every different store and make their own prices cheaper. They buy bulk and they sell fresh meat, too.”

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A Day in the Life of a Depanneur

Owning a dépanneur has a big impact on your social life, says Yodh Ubhi, standing behind the counter of Dépanneur PMS at the corner of Park Ave. and Villeneuve St.

“You have none,” Ubhi said.

He’s not kidding. Ubhi’s hours—14 hours a day, seven days a week—would make most office workers weep. Every morning, he opens the store at 7 a.m., and works without a break until early afternoon, when his wife arrives with lunch. Ubhi eats in the store’s basement, a former bank vault, before taking a three-hour siesta. At 6 p.m., he trudges back upstairs and takes over from his wife, who returns home to make dinner. The day finally ends at midnight, when Ubhi closes shop and returns home to Park Extension.

“It’s not a one-person job,” he said, adding his 18-year-old daughter and 21-year-old son, both students, often come to help.

Ubhi, who came to Montreal from India’s Punjab state in the early 1970s, bought his dépanneur in 2002, after nearly two decades in the textile business. At $65,000—a little over $100,000 with inventory—the store was a bargain. Spacious and well-stocked, it had already undergone a $150,000 renovation in the 1990s when it was part of a small dépanneur chain that ultimately folded.

“I had no experience whatsoever in the dep business,” Ubhi said. “I saw guys working and thought, ‘Hey, that’s nothing, it’s a piece of cake.’ But it’s not that easy. It’s very demanding. There are long hours. You have to know about your supply, cash flow, customers, your neighbourhood, and on top of that you have to provide good service. If you don’t have even one of these, you’re screwed up. You’re not going to last a year.” At the beginning, Ubhi made mistakes, like offering credit.

“When you’re new, you believe everyone,” he said, but he soon realized he had lost nearly $7,000 to customers who had scammed him out of cigarettes and alcohol. Now, a cartoon drawing of a gangster with the caption, “No Credit: It’s Time to Pay Up, Sucka!” is displayed prominently at the cash.

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Ethnic Depanneurs

Although most depanneurs are owned by immigrants or people from what Quebec politicians like to call “cultural communities,” they typically bear few traces of their proprietor’s ethnic origin. Sometimes there might be a heater on the counter containing churros or samosas but, for the most part, deps focus on the holy trinity of beer, tobacco and lottery tickets.

In some neighbourhoods, though, depanneurs are transformed into hybrid businesses that are half ethnic grocery, half ordinary dep. Marché Chanab, at the corner of St. Roch and Querbes in Park Extension, is one example, selling a variety of imported products along with the traditional depanneur staples. Like any dep, it draws a wide cross-section of neighbourhood residents, but the Punjabi scripts on its sign let potential South Asian customers know that it offers something extra.

Similar are the many Chinese depanneurs that have emerged in Verdun over the past several years, which sell Chinese veggies and packaged food alongside the usual soft drinks and potato chips. It’s a good business strategy: cater to the borough’s growing Chinese population while still serving as the corner dep on which nearby residents rely.

My Dep

My depanneur is shy, hiding under a staircase on the long block of Park Avenue between Bernard and Van Horne, about five seconds from my front door. A large Coke sign (joined more recently by a few sandwich boards) advertises its existence. Inside, all of the dep staples — lotto machine, cigarettes, chocolate bars, soda, packaged food and beer — are crammed into a tiny space not even half the size of my four-room apartment.

When my girlfriend and I moved into our apartment three years ago, the dep was owned by an odd, talkative man from Guangdong province in China. Small, bald and skinny, he spent his days watching Radio-Canada on a small TV — not, I suspect, out of enthusiasm for Canada’s public broadcaster, but simply because that was the only channel his television’s rabbit-ear antennae received.

One evening, while buying a can of coke, my girlfriend chatted with him for a bit in Cantonese. Rather abruptly, he lectured her: what was nice Chinese girl doing in such a crummy neighbourhood? Why not move downtown?

She didn’t go back to the dep very often after that. It was with a tinge of relief, then, that we noticed one winter day two and a half years ago that the bald man had sold the depanneur. In his place was a fresh-faced couple from northern China. Where, exactly? I asked one evening. “Near Beijing,” said the new owner, shyly. His wife beamed and rubbed her pregnant belly. Their baby was born that summer. They named her Zoey.

The depanneur’s new owner is as sincere and shy as the old one was smarmy and condescending. Over the past couple of years, he has earnestly rearranged the store and installed new fridges. A selection of Hollywood movies is available to rent.

It wasn’t long before he discarded the old television set, too, replacing it with a new one that featured a built-in DVD player. Now, when I step in every so often to buy a case of beer, I find him sitting behind the counter, watching historical epics or episodes of 24 subtitled in Chinese.

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Dépanneur Weijia

I can’t remember what was there before Weijia. Another depanneur, sure, but obviously not a remarkable one. I’m not even sure it had a sign. But then, a couple of years ago, a friendly, middle-aged couple from the northern Chinese province of Shandong bought the depanneur and mounted a large vinyl banner that clearly announced both the store’s vocation and the ethnic origin of its owners. Neither of the couple can speak French or English; instead, they speak a mangled hybrid, so that when you buy a bottle of beer they are likely to say, “Bonjour! Two dollar! Merci!”

Dépanneur Weijia is located on Park Avenue in Mile End, between a laundromat and a vacant building that onced housed Marko’s Textiles. (The story of Marko, which involves a shooting death, flags and a mysterious fire, can read here.) Although it has a Chinese name and sign, there is nothing particularly Chinese about what is sold at Weijia, just a run-of-the-mill assortment of newspapers, snacks, soft drinks, beer and cigarettes.

Intentionally or not, however, Weijia is part of a neighbourhood trend. As new Chinese immigrants buy Mile End’s depanneurs, they are giving them distinctly Chinese names: Zi Yuan, for instance, or Xin Ying. This appears to be a break from the tradition of maintaining old or generic names. Of course, every Montrealer knows that a depanneur’s name is hardly important. Some stores don’t even bother to display them, or even to mount a sign—the Molson placards in the windows will suffice.

Perhaps, then, giving their dépanneur a name like Weijia was a way for an immigrant couple to claim a bit of the Park Avenue landscape for themselves. That certainly seemed the case last summer, when the neighbourhood was experiencing a bout of World Cup fever and flags from around the world were paraded around Montreal. China’s team didn’t even qualify for the cup, but that didn’t stop Weijia’s owners from mounting a small People’s Republic flag on their door, five yellow stars shining in the summer sun.

An Introduction to Depanneurs

“Salut, monsieur!”

Running in to grab a couple of beers, I’m greeted by the clerk. He’s an odd guy, with a closely shaved crop of black hair and a self-important, Duddy Kravitzesque charm that comes across whether he’s addressing you in English or French. There’s a bit of irony in his greeting, and in the way he dresses, too: sometimes he wears a suit to work, other times he’s entirely in black. He listens to punk music and likes to read Anne Rice novels. Where New York has its bodegas and Korean markets, and Paris l’arabe du coin, Montreal has the depanneur—or dépanneur, if you prefer—though most people just say the dep.

It’s easy to spot a depanneur: look for a large blue Molson Dry placard in the window, which tends to make any other signage pretty much superfluous. Out front, a few big Quilnot delivery bikes might be splayed across the sidewalk, accompanied by delivery boys catching their breath before the next laborious livraison. Inside, the dep is a blast of narrow, cluttered rows, newspaper racks, coolers and god knows what else, all in an area about the same size as a tiny one-bedroom apartment. 7-Eleven this ain’t.

In fact, it’s hard not to notice Montreal’s depanneurs. They’re everywhere (although they occasionally relent to make room for a pharmacy or café, maybe a strip club or two). On Bernard Avenue in the Mile End district, there are five depanneurs in as many blocks, not incuding the café named (what else?) Le Dépanneur.

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