The Neighborhood's Little General Store

On a corner in a French neighborhood, a long red diamond-shaped sign hangs vertically above a small shop. This red sign, called carotte, a "carrot" sign for tobacco shops, is a legally required marker; its name comes from the shape of tobacco leaves that were once tightly rolled together. Beneath it is a tabac, a neighborhood shop for nearly everything.

It began as a tobacco shop. But over the course of a century, it became a place where almost every small transaction of daily life could happen at a single counter: a newspaper, an instant lottery ticket, a bus pass, a sheet of stamps, a tax stamp for the car, a horse-racing bet. At the small café bar at one end of the counter, older regulars unfold the day’s newspaper in front of a cup of espresso.

It was no accident that these shops became all-purpose places. Tobacco had been a state monopoly since the Napoleonic era of 1810, and the sales rights entrusted to buralistes, licensed tobacco retailers, gradually expanded into other delegated services: stamps, tax stamps, lottery tickets, transport passes. In time, the tabac settled in as a small neighborhood administrative counter and café. Across France, there are about 23,000 of them, roughly one for every 2,900 people.

Someone steps in early in the morning for the newspaper, someone after lunch for a small espresso, someone toward evening with a lottery ticket in hand. Under the red carotte, the day passes with five different textures at once.