Shan shop
March 14th 2026
The Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) tell us that shan is a bakers’ term for, “inferior or damaged loaves”. These would be sold cheaply from a shan shop.
In 1991, a Dundee resident told DSL: “Ye mind on him … he opened the shan shop that sellt aulders in the Hilltoon”. Aulders are day-old goods sold by bakers at a reduced price.
These shops are well remembered in Glasgow. Jimmy Boyle shared the following in A Sense of Freedom (1977): “On a Saturday morning Harry and I would get up and go down to the Shan shop at the bottom of our street, and keep a place in the enormous queue … The Shan shop was a Co-op store that sold fresh spoils sent over from the nearby Co-op Bakery and it was very popular as people would come from all over to get the cheap, fresh food”.
Another memory featured in the Daily Record in March 2009: “With hard times ahead, I remember years ago in Glasgow – bags of broken biscuits, penny chipped apples (fruit with bad bits cut out), pokes of crispy batter (bits off the fish), the Shan shop that sold mis-shapen and damaged confectionery”.
Finally, from Danny Gill’s Gorbals and Oatlands (2015): “Across the road from our tenement, the UCBS had a row of shops which still remain. It was here they had their ‘shan shop’ where day old produce, not sold round their shops in the city, was brought to be sold off at knock down prices”.
Dictionaries of the Scots Language would like to thank Bob Dewar for illustrating our Scots Word of the Week feature.
