Word.ws English Dictionary

company store

company store noun: a retailer of provisions and general merchandise, owned by a firm which operates a mine or other industry nearby, and at which the firm's employees are required to shop, to pay high prices, and to make payments through payroll deductions or a truck system, typically resulting in the accumulation of considerable employee indebtedness.

Noun

company store (plural company stores)

  1. A retailer of provisions and general merchandise, owned by a firm which operates a mine or other industry nearby, and at which the firm's employees are required to shop, to pay high prices, and to make payments through payroll deductions or a truck system, typically resulting in the accumulation of considerable employee indebtedness.
    • Skeelty, who thought he knew how to manage these people, allowed every man, at the close of work on Saturday, to purchase a pint of whiskey from the company store, charging an exorbitant price that netted a huge profit.1912, L. Frank Baum, chapter 9, in Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation
    • In the year and more that he had worked, faithfully and persistently, to get out coal for Peter Harrigan, he had never once been able to get ahead of his bill for the necessities of life at Old Peter's store. . . . [I]n any case, the best he could hope for in life was to work for some other...1917, Upton Sinclair, chapter 26, in King Coal

Synonyms of company store

Forms of company store

pluralcompany stores
alternative formcompany-store

Questions about company store

What does company store mean?
Company store means a retailer of provisions and general merchandise, owned by a firm which operates a mine or other industry nearby, and at which the firm's employees are required to shop, to pay high prices, and to make payments through payroll deductions or a truck system, typically resulting in the accumulation of considerable employee indebtedness.
What part of speech is company store?
Company store is a noun.
What is the plural of company store?
The plural of company store is company stores.

Words near company store in the dictionary

  1. company seal
  2. company seals
  3. company sergeant major
  4. company sergeant majors
  5. company sergeants major
  6. company store
  7. company stores
  8. company time
  9. company town
  10. company towns
  11. company union

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: company store (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “company store.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/company_store. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.