“Fronts for Drugs, Money Laundering, and Other Stuff”: Convenience Stores in the Retail Food Environment

ABSTRACT

There have been calls for more research to investigate the sociocultural context of retail food environments. This paper examines how a segment of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, residents described convenience stores (CS) in their local retail food environments. 84 social media discussions from Ottawa residents pertaining to their local retail food outlets were qualitatively analyzed, and three themes were formulated: 1) CS are interchangeable, 2) CS are not ‘real stores,’ and 3) CS are dangerous retail food outlets. We argue that these social constructions of CS have implications for healthy food environments and offer suggestions for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• convenience stores
• healthy corner stores
• retail food environment
• sociocultural

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Dr Irena Knezevic for her help with analysis and preparation of this manuscript and Ottawa Public Health for their support.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Meghan Lynch’s Canadian Institutes of Health Research Fellowship and Ottawa Public Health Fellowship and Catherine Mah’s Canada Research Chairs program [NA]