I’m not sure what this says of my academic abilities when the things I remember most about school were the convenience stores I’d go to during the lunch break, and how I stretched every penny my parents gave me to maximize my junk food consumption.

At the Daisy Mart across from my junior high, I would buy a single cappuccino-flavoured Chupa Chup lollipop for a quarter (tax included, of course). Farther back, at the long-gone convenience store near my elementary school, I’d have the guy behind the counter cut open a 75-cent, full-sized Freezie for me (blue raspberry, always). At both was the backlit glow of pop bottles in a kaleidoscope of colours not found in nature — with the exception, perhaps, of venomous frogs — that was as beautiful as a Tiffany glass lamp.

As an adult I now restrict myself to one can of pop a month (that limit has slightly loosened now that it’s summer). But when I’m visiting a new city I make it a point to check out a corner store’s regional and specialty pop that would be hard to find at a typical supermarket.

Turns out there’s a convenience store at my childhood plaza that stocks the sodas I’m obsessed with.

“People have been buying these by the case,” says Raphael Oh, picking up a bottle of Moon Mist, a Mountain Dew-like pop made by the Detroit-based Faygo soda company.

For the past five years, Oh has been the owner of Forest Convenience at Parkway Forest Plaza. It’s hidden behind a maze of old midrise rental apartments and newer luxury townhouses at the southwest corner of Don Mills Rd. and Sheppard Ave. in North York. It’s a plaza only residents would know about, as it’s dwarfed by Fairview Mall on the other side of Sheppard.

“The previous owner almost had nothing, just the regular stuff like Coke,” says Oh, who took over the shop five years ago, as he shows me the backroom filled with cases of pop and juice. “When I took over the shop, people asked me for Red Bull, then pineapple drinks and Fanta. If I didn’t have it, I’ll make a memo and look out for it when I’m restocking. There’s a lot of different nationalities around here, so everyone has different tastes.”

While the plaza is small, it does its best to serve surrounding residents. In addition to a hair salon, laundromat and medical offices, there’s an Indian and Pakistani takeout joint, a Foodland supermarket with a sizable selection of frozen paratha and Jamaican patties, and a Chinese hot pot restaurant.

Oh isn’t trying to be the biggest purveyor of sodas — that title arguably goes to Soda Pop Central in Lakefield, Ont., north of Peterborough, which sells hundreds of rare and region-specific pop — but he listens to customer requests. He was recently asked to find Pink Ting, a rosy-coloured variation of Ting, a Jamaican grapefruit soda commonly found at Caribbean restaurants. He sells the regular kind that comes in a green bottle, along with juices from other Caribbean brands such as Grace and Cool Runnings, and after a few months of searching, he finally found the pink Ting.

He does, however, sell Tahitian Treat, a carbonated and ultra sweet-tasting (it contains more sugar than a can of Coke or Pepsi) fruit punch with a hint of cream soda that’s a cult favourite amongst ’90s kids and recently received a boost from a Drake lyric. Oh sells it by the can or in a case of a dozen 20-oz bottles for about $10, though since my last visit in mid-June when he sold out of the two cases he had.

It’s here that I had peach-flavoured Crush for the first time, which comes from the U.S. and isn’t even mentioned on Crush Canada’s site (it’s delightful in an ice cream float, by the way). There’s also limited-run flavours of Canada Dry in pineapple, peach, and black cherry wishniak cordial.

Sadly, he doesn’t have my favourite pop: lemon-mint San Pellegrino, which I’ve brought back by the caseload from the U.S. but have yet to find in Toronto over the last two years. He says he’ll keep an eye out for it.

Oh owns the store with his wife, Segunda, and he has five part-time employees. The couple moved to Canada from Seoul, South Korea, in 1985 after Oh fell in love with Canada on a visit (“It’s really calm, and the people are really kind and soft, if that makes sense,” he says). He held various jobs, such as running a dollar shop for three years and being a distributor for Carlton cards for 10. After a few investments didn’t work out, a friend encouraged him to get into the convenience store business as it was a common way for many Korean immigrants to make money.

With few job options available to him, Oh has been working at convenience stores for the past 18 years, and took over Forest Convenience in 2014. He’s the fourth owner and estimates the store has been around for around 40 years.

Oh says he often scouts pops at cash and carry stores, Costco-like wholesalers where convenience store owners, caterers and restaurateurs load up on product including drinks, snacks and pre-made frozen food.

Even at 63, Oh does most of the buying himself rather than having it delivered. He’ll stop at multiple cash-and-carries across the GTA, lugging cases of pop back to the car. “It’s why I got a lot of muscles,” he says with a laugh.

It’s his way of saving on delivery costs, as well as quality control. “I have to check the expiry date on everything,” Oh says. “Especially if it’s pop coming from the U.S. because it might have been sitting around longer. Sometimes one place will have a better price, but the date isn’t good so I can’t carry it. When I opened the store, I had to throw out a lot because I didn’t know what sold so things would go bad. I wasted a lot of money.”

Even though there’s a mall across the street, Oh considers online retail giants such as Amazon and Wal-Mart to be his biggest competitors. In an era when same-day shipping on practically everything, including groceries, is increasingly common, it’s tough for mom-and-pop shops to survive.

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“I have to give more variety to the customer. A big supermarket needs big quantities of one kind of product to fill the shelves, but a convenience store is different. We can buy a little of everything and keep the variety for everyone,” he says.

He considers himself lucky for now, being the only convenience store surrounded by thousands of apartment units filled with regular customers popping in and asking Oh how his day is going.

“In convenience stores, you have to have a friendship with customers and treat them like family to survive.”