Saleh’s Mini-Market, Spital Hill, Burngreave, Sheffield

Saleh Hussein Abdullah started his business in 1996 and is now the longest-standing shopkeeper around The Green at the top of Spital Hill, Burngreave. Serving the Yemeni/Somali/Asian communities, he’s seen the area transform. Apparently, the neighbourhood used to have higher crime, but as more Moslem families moved in, the area has gained stability. Saleh says “It’s got a bit more problematic in the last three or four years, but it’s much better than it was in the 1990s.”

When he first arrived, the area used to be relatively uninhabited. There were lots of empty properties and the council would give prospective tenants a few sets of keys and let them choose which they wanted. But towards the end of the nineties, the housing stock filled up. Now, people can wait up to a year to be housed.

Saleh owns the building his shop occupies and business was very good up until a year or so ago. Recently however, his takings have halved. Saleh thinks this is partly to do with the recession and people being more careful, but also, there used to be 4 mini-markets around The Green and now there are 13, so there’s a lot less custom to go round.

Most of Saleh's trade is done on credit. Customers can accumulate up to £200 or £300 each and pay it off at the end of the month. He has a credit book in which he writes things down, but some of his customers just help themselves to what they need, (there’s a golf club in the shop, which is used to hook down boxes of cereal or rice from the upper shelves), then keep a note of what they owe themselves.

Occasionally, someone will ask for cigarettes or some Khat to chew and say they’ll come back with the money. He knows they probably won’t, but as it’s only a couple of quid, he’ll still give it to them to save a fuss. Most customers are local, but some come from afar. Occasionally they’ll even get Saudi Arabian students from Manchester driving over to Sheffield to eat in neighbouring restaurants, before stocking up on familiar flavours at Saleh's. The language of the shop is primarily Arabic.

If customers want something that he doesn’t stock, they will go elsewhere, but otherwise they are very loyal. When we asked why customers choose his shop rather than one of other 12, he replied: “I respect them and they respect me”. His friend agreed. “He’s been here the longest and he is trusted”.

NB: As was the case with almost every shop we visited in Istanbul, Saleh hospitably offered us a drink during our conversation, and gave us a bottle of mineral water each.

Muharrem Yorganci’s Archive

Now aged 83, Mr Yorganci bought a camera at the age of 14 and has since habitually photographed and archived all parts of his life including family, friends, weddings, funerals and the customers of their shop.

He ran a small shop with his beloved wife Nermin, for 50 years. “A very beautiful and sweet commercial life passed by. The most important thing was that we did it together.” Their shop was situated in a fairly low-income neighbourhood near Eminonu. His customers were mostly neighbours and friends from the same town on the Black Sea coast. “There was social intimacy in our area. I offered them a chair, we served tea and would talk.”

What follows are extracts from an interview with Mr Yorganci about his life, shop and his photographs.

“We lived above the shop and I remember being disturbed at all hours. A tailor on a deadline might knock at 2am to ask for a replacement for a broken needle. We would serve them, not thinking about profit, but it was our professional duty.”

“When I was a child, my father owned a bakkal, which sold everything for the village. Customers shopped on credit with their debt noted down in our ‘bakkal book’. In 1944, when I had finished school in Istanbul and returned to my village, I wanted to (but didn’t) take photos of the customers and stick them next to their debt. The idea of photographing customers comes from there.”

“In our Istanbul shop, a man had some items in the credit book when he passed away. His son was a child at the time. 15 years later, this young man came to the shop and said ‘I think my father owed you, let’s even things up’. When he began to work, he paid the debt. Because of inflation the debt was nothing at all, but I still let him pay. This gesture, of him remembering to come back and pay his father’s debt, brought tears to our eyes.”

“I replace my camera every few years. Now my daughter says ‘let’s buy you a digital camera’, but I don’t want one. I’ve been taking my films to the same shop since the beginning of the 1970s. I’ve known Rifat, the owner for more than 30 years and there’s a strong bond between us. I sit for an hour or so and drink tea. Then I go again to collect the prints. If I went digital, I would lose that regular contact with my friend.”

Shop photos
“I photographed all the customers I knew, the ones to whom I served tea and chatted with.”

I knew Ahmet from our home town. In Istanbul, he was a neighbour. He worked as a bearer, carrying fruit and vegetables. He bought from the shop all the time and we offered him credit so he could pay later. He’d buy socks, shirts and underwear. When he returned to our hometown for the summer, he would buy gifts. Scarves for his wife, needles and thread. Eau de cologne.”

This man used to work as an assistant for a shoemaker. My wife made his wife’s wedding dress. He’d come and buy things all the time, the same things as Ahmet. Gifts for newborns, socks, scarves and underwear, school materials for his children, bags, etc.”
“This man used to work as a Shoemaker’s assistant. My wife made his wife’s wedding dress. He’d come and buy things all the time, the same things as Ahmet. Gifts for newborns, socks, scarves and underwear, school materials for his children, bags.”

“I would ask children from the neighbourhood to wait by the door so I could take their photograph. I remember this child. She was our neighbour’s daughter. Parents could safely send their children on errands alone. They had confidence in the shops and their owners, and the neighbourhood had very little traffic. She’d buy pens, pencils, notebooks or whatever her mother sent her to buy.”

This photo below shows three of the many photos Mr Yorgani has of himself and which were taken by his customers.

Hampar Gögdemir, Kurtulus, Istanbul

A shop in the Kurtulus neighbourhood of Istanbul. Fitted-out with elegant display counters, it sells good Turkish brands of unisex underwear and nightwear.

Business isn’t good. The present crisis is affecting sales because vast quantities of clothing were manufactured in Turkey for an export market that no longer exists. These items are being sold off locally at very low retail prices in factory shops, markets and arcades. Mr Gögdemir can’t afford to match these low prices. However, he’s got more chance of survival because he owns the shop so is not paying rent. There were six other shops like his in the neighbourhood, which have all closed down.

Shopping habits are changing. Nowadays customers either go Marks & Spencer for quality or to the arcades and markets for very cheap prices. He told us of a long-term customer who brought her daughter into the shop. Upsettingly, the daughter didn’t want to buy anything, she preferred M&S.

Mr Gögdemir knows many of his customers by sight. He’s known some customers since the shop opened 25 years ago. A few elderly customers still bring him home-cooked food. He used to know the customers better. Few take the time to sit down for a glass of tea and talk about the different generations, like they used to. They come in, buy what they need and disappear.

The community used to be closer knit. A woman might buy a housedress and show her neighbour. Half an hour later the neighbour would turn up to buy one too. Then half an hour later another neighbour would come. It’s not like this anymore.

Mr Gögdemir used to drink tea and play games with other local shopkeepers in the street outside. However, tea from the teahouse has grown increasingly expensive (five glasses a day costs over £60 a month), so now he brews his own. He’s never encouraged other shopkeepers to enter and socialise within the shop, as he wouldn’t want to present a female customer with a row of men in front of the counter.

We spoke to Mr Gögdemir about the way shopkeepers greet customers. In the underwear shop, with its higher class of customer and more intimate nature, he usually addresses customers as ‘madam’ or ‘sir’, to keep a respectful distance. However, “if someone wearing a headscarf comes in or someone who seems lower class and therefore might care more about her womanly virtue or reputation, I will be sensitive to her situation and without thinking, I would greet her as ‘Abla’ (big sister), to try to put her at ease.” By using kinship names like aunt or sister, a shopkeeper makes the customer family. By removing sexuality from their interaction, he protects her virtue.

Maria & Ion Ocâ's dairy, Iaşi

Maria’s grandparents lived in this house, before she and her husband Ion took over the smallholding, in a countryside village about 15 minutes drive from Iaşi.

Maria has delivered handmade cheese, cream and occasionally milk to nine customers’ homes in the Tataraşi, every 10 days or so, for the past 40 years. Some of the older people died and now she delivers to their descendants. She delivered these products throughout the communist era, outside the state’s rationing system of the 1980s: a small-scale, subsistence ‘black market’.

Maria learnt to make cheese from her grandmother, who also used to make butter. “She’d put the butter on a plate and make it round like a haystack and then take the spoon and make all sorts of patterns. People bought it by the 100gms. Both my mother and my grandmother used to go market. And I used to go with them to the market. Now I sell at the market. I sell whatever we have, beans, corn, in summer we sell vegetables from the garden. In the market, customers look at the way we look, how clean our hands are, how clean our apron is, what the basket looks like, how white the cheesecloth is. They look and then they choose whom to buy from.”

Some years Maria sells wine, but this year she’s putting it aside as her son is getting married this coming summer. They sell homemade plum brandy. They have various fowl, goats, sheep, cows, horses, honeybees and a dappled, snorting pig, which is being fattened up for Christmas.

We were talking in Maria’s back room of her house, when she flung open the doors of a cupboard to reveal her cheese-to-be. Each day she milks the cows and stores the milk in these earthenware jars. The jars were made by Roma pottery makers, who used to come around and sell at the door, but they don’t come anymore, so when Maria breaks a pot, she can’t replace it.

“If both shelves are full of pots, then I know I have enough for all of my customers. It takes about a week or ten days to fill up both shelves. The cream rises to the top. And then it has to sit and curdle because you can’t put fresh milk into cheese. The milk curdles and you separate that out and make the cheese with it. You warm it up on the stove and you put it in cheesecloth and leave it to strain, leave it dripping until it is dense.”

Markets, Iaşi

We happened upon Constantin Gherasim one Sunday morning at the neighbourhood market in Alexandru, one of several municipal open markets. A Romanian Orthodox Byzantine Chant, from the towers of a newly built local church, drifted over the marketplace as he told us about his choice of purchase and why he shops there. He’d bought potatoes at 1RON per kg (about 25p) and impressed upon us his preference for the Romanian cartofi that filled his bag. He believes them to be ‘healthier, more natural’ than those imported from countries abroad, like Turkey. 

“I really know about potatoes,” he declared. We learnt that he managed their production when he worked as an economist and accountant at the large Sarca Farm, outside of the city. “Our soil is not so polluted, we don’t use too many chemical fertilizers,” he says. "I know everything that goes into the process and what should come out … it’s not quantity of produce that counts, but quality.”

Alexandru Market, like it’s counterparts elsewhere in the city - Nicolina, Tatarasi, and Halle Central - has existed since the communist-era. These are Iaşi’s traditional marketplaces based on a local agricultural economy, and currently offering low-cost seasonal fruits and vegetables, fresh meat and dairy products, fish, and other local produce.

We sampled herbs and mushrooms handpicked from the forest, fields or roadside; raw and freshly pickled vegetables from 50 litre barrels; sheep cheese, cow cheese, milk, meat, honey and nuts; a majority of which came direct from the producer.

A cheese farmer, like Samica Gangal here at Halle Centrale, would perhaps make 1,200kg of cheese every summer at her countryside farm before selling it in Iaşi for 18 RON per kg.

The growth of Iaşi’s Fast Moving Consumer Goods sector (Supermarkets) has impacted the marketplaces’ popularity over the last couple of years. Despite this, many people we spoke with echoed Constantin’s loyality to the markets, preferring the natural produce, which basically translates as organic.

Constantin also thinks people ought to buy from there to encourage local production. “Why import when we have perfectly good or better products of our own”. To this end, he intends to start an organic honey farm and sell his produce at the market.

He was amongst the 60-70 customers we interviewed at the municipal markets (plus a similar number at supermarkets) to develop a publication called Cumpărături Alese, or Hand-Picked. It’s a (supermarket style) brochure comparing the motivation behind people’s choice at the markets and the supermarkets.

Slow Shop, Guangzhou

Slow Shop, tucked away on the 5th floor of a Mall by Martyrs Park metro station, is an enterprise run by designer/photographer, Ya Ya Qiu. Friends introduced us to Slow because it represents two things relatively new in contemporary China, an independent brand with an entrepreneurial spirit; ‘Take your time, it’s your life’ reads the maxim on her business card.

Ya Ya divides her time everyday between the shop, designing at home, and visiting local factories discussing production. Selling clothes, accessories, soft furnishings, home wares, gifts etc… roughly 80% of the products in the shop are her design and made locally, with the remainder produced by other young local designers.

One of the things she wants to bring to the public is an appreciation of Chinese characters, by putting them on clothing – rather than English-language slogans and brands – and for the characters to be seen as modern, desirable and up to date. She’s also making and exhibiting sustainable shopping bags to cut down on plastic. Her business started 3 years ago and she’s soon to open a new branch in Beijing

Angelo Flores, Box 12, Mercado das Flores, São Paulo

With over 22 Box stalls, the Mercado Das Flores stretches for some 300 metres outside the Cemeterio do Araca, in the Clinicas district of the city. Being on a busy roadside, it also provides an aromatic treat for a passenger or driver with their window open.

This is Sueli and Marco Aurelio. She's been working there for 20 years and he for 40. Like a number of stall holders, they are open 24 hours a day, sell both cut and potted flowers and buy stock from the large Ceasa flower market on the outskirts of the city. However, they are the only sellers who do business over the internet. Early mornings they snatch some sleep on a small mattress under the display.

We spent Friday evenings with them and the other sellers, asking customers for the story behind their purchase. For Sueli and Marco, business is not as busy as it used to be, as flowers are now more expensive. They have different customers at different times of the week. Most people pull up their car and buy flowers for special occasions, house decoration, or if it is late in the evening/early morning, for a party or apology flowers for their loved ones. Now, we were told, hardly anyone visits their family graves in the cemetery behind the stalls. Young people don’t do it. We did watch an older woman buy some yellow chrysanthemums; apparently, along with white chrysanths, the flowers of choice for graves.

Rose at Box 22 revealed that a few families do buy flowers for graves every Sunday morning, and have done for years. Also, if it is Mothers' Day, a birthday, Dia dos Finados (the Day of the Dead) then they will come on that day too. So that week, they'd come twice. But mostly, it’s passing traffic, buying for gifts and celebrations.

Floricultura Cardeal, São Paulo

We spent two Sunday mornings with Antonio, who along with his sister Lucia, runs a pair of neighbouring flower shops close to the entrance of Cemeterio São Paulo, in the Pinheiros district of the city.

Antonio is Portuguese, came to Brazil as a young man and married here. He looks unbelievably good for 76, a fact he ascribes to hard work, faith and not abusing himself with alcohol and women. He starts work early enough in the morning to see night clubbers returning home; he bemoans the sight of young women/men drunk and out of control.

He handed Rebecca a simple printed prayer dedicated to a girl called Izildinha, ‘my kind little sister’. In a basic translation the prayer asks; for full devotion to the Father and the son; that the father and the son cover Izildinha with blessings and diminish the sufferings of all those that invoke Gods name; for repayment with good faith, and belief in the Father, the son and Izildinha; for a stripping of vanity, pride, envy and a forgiveness of evil and a dedication to love those closest; for happiness in the home; that honest work lead to life’s necessities; and that the bread earned be enough to feed those more needy.

The atmosphere on these Sunday mornings was far more contemplative than Clinicas. Away from the main road, not many customers. Some of those that we met were weekly visitors to family graves. We asked them the same question about the story behind their purchase.