The real question is why someone didn’t think of this sooner. Among the skyline that would compose Nova Scotia’s identity, bumping up between the slender neck of the Peggy’s Cove lighthouse and the squat-in-size, tall-in-stature painted house of Maud Lewis, stands a grey colossus, the last outpost of retail: Guy’s Frenchy’s. As much a part of the Nova Scotian landscape as fields of lupins, the discount shopping chain was born on the province’s Acadian shore out of a workplace feud that draws easy parallels with the story of how McDonald’s came to be. I know all this, of course, because I finished my metamorphosis into a real Nova Scotian (if you believe such a thing exists, which I only do half of the time) by throwing myself headlong into the lore of Frenchy’s. I travelled to every location in mainland Nova Scotia, met the man who invented the bin-diving second-hand shops, and called over 20 people to ask them about the best thing they ever found at a Frenchy’s. For years, I was insufferable at parties talking about the chain…