Korean Corner Shops: How Convenience Stores Took Over

Every Korean over forty has the same memory: a tiny shop at the bottom of the alley, a grandmother behind a counter stacked with cigarettes, a fridge of Yakult and banana milk, and a wooden platform bench out front where the neighbourhood men drank makgeolli in the evening.

That shop was the 구멍가게 (gumeong-gage). Its replacement is the fluorescent box on every corner that sells you lunch, pays your electricity bill, takes your parcel and never closes. The four big chains alone ran more than 54,000 of them in 2024, and the corner shop they grew over is disappearing.

This is Part 5 of our Vanished Seoul series.

What exactly was a gumeong-gage?

A small, family-run general store, usually no bigger than a single room. The name literally means “hole shop”. One common explanation is simply that it was a shop the size of a hole in the wall: a Korean reference wiki traces the phrase to a 1914 newspaper describing a tiny store “like a dugout”. Older people also call it a 점방 (jeombang), an old word for shop.

Statistics Korea has a more precise definition. General grocery stores under 165 square metres are the “small shop” category; 165 to 3,000 square metres is a supermarket; above 3,000 is a large discount store. By floor area, most convenience stores would qualify as corner shops. The difference is not size. It is the franchise.

When did convenience stores arrive in Korea?

In May 1989, in Bangi-dong in southeast Seoul, the year after the Olympics.

The store usually counted as the first was the 7-Eleven Olympic branch, in the shopping complex of the Olympic Athletes’ Village. Early customers were puzzled by a shop that sold the same things as the corner store at higher prices, but it found its audience in students, young couples and taxi drivers, who came for slush and fountain drinks. FamilyMart, later renamed CU, and LG25, now GS25, followed soon after.

The growth was slow for a decade and then relentless.

📈 Corner shops down, convenience stores up

Allowing for the change of survey along the way, Korea lost roughly 30,000 small grocery shops in a decade and gained almost 18,000 chain convenience stores, and the convenience-store count then more than doubled again.

Why did the corner shop lose?

Because the convenience store was built for the Korea that was coming, not the one that existed.

The corner shop depended on a stable neighbourhood of families who knew the owner, bought on tab and walked. The convenience store served single people, shift workers and students who wanted a hot meal at 2am, a card payment and a parcel drop-off, and who had no interest in being known. Korea’s households were getting smaller fast; our piece on Seoul’s solo households shows how far that has gone.

Add to that the franchise machinery: headquarters logistics, private-label food, marketing, and the ability to open a new store on any corner that looks promising. A 1990s corner shop owner competing with that was an elderly person with a notebook. Many of them did the only rational thing and converted. When the government studied closures under its own support programme, below, about half of the shops that left had turned into convenience stores or ordinary supermarkets.

Did the government try to save them?

Yes, with the Nadeul Gage (나들가게) programme, launched in 2010. The idea was to modernise independent neighbourhood shops with new signs, lighting, point-of-sale systems and supplier support so they could compete with the chains.

Figures from the Ministry of SMEs and Startups, released to a National Assembly member in 2018 and reported by MI Economy, showed 11,473 shops designated and 3,696 closed or cancelled, with 7,785 still operating. About 90% of the closures happened without the ministry being told, and around half of those shops had become convenience stores or ordinary supermarkets. The Scoop reported in 2021 that new applications stopped in December 2020 after about 113.4 billion won had been spent, and that sales at participating shops with sales data had fallen 10.5% between 2016 and 2019. It was replaced by a “smart supermarket” scheme built around technology upgrades for the same kind of shop.

Have convenience stores stopped growing?

Just about. According to company figures compiled by Asia Economy, the four big chains had 54,875 stores at the end of 2023 and 54,852 at the end of 2024: CU 18,458, GS25 18,112, 7-Eleven 12,152 and emart24 6,130. It was the first fall since 1989. MediaPen put the 2025 total at 53,266, with 7-Eleven alone down by more than 1,100 stores.

For the story of how those four brands were built, and what young Koreans actually buy in them, see our guide to Korea’s convenience store universe. For the practical side, there is what medicine you can buy at night and the rules on drinking outside, where the old pyeongsang lives on as the plastic table in front of the CU.

Where can you still see an old corner shop in Seoul?

In a museum reliably, and in the wild if you look.

National Folk Museum of Korea, 7080 Memory Street. The outdoor street in the museum grounds, inside Gyeongbokgung, recreates a Seoul alley of the late 1970s and early 1980s with a supermarket, a general store, a stationery shop, a comic room, a music tearoom and a barbershop, all dressed with period goods and signage. It reopened in a new form in May 2023 and was drawing foreign visitors in spring 2026; parts of it can close in rain.

📍 Open in Naver Map

One correction to older guidebooks: the Cheonggyecheon shantytown theme zone next to the Cheonggyecheon Museum, once known for its reconstructed 1960s shack interiors, was renovated in 2022 into an ecology rest space. The period rooms are gone. The museum itself is still worth a visit for the wider story of the stream and the people displaced from it, which we tell in where Seoul’s shantytowns went.

We are not naming a specific living corner shop here. They open, close and change hands too often for us to promise one will be there when you arrive. But they are not hard to find if you know the signs.

If you would rather see them on paper, the painter Lee Me-kyeong has spent about twenty years travelling Korea to draw corner shops in pen and acrylic ink, and her work has become the definitive portrait of the type. It is a fitting end for the gumeong-gage: already more likely to be framed than visited. For the prices those shops charged, and what the same things cost today, see Seoul prices twenty years apart.