My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [31]
THEY SAY THE hardest part of running a business is finding good personnel, but with a convenience store it should be easy, right? We’re not necessarily looking for register gods like Dwayne or Kay. We’re looking for people whose technical competence maxes out at Velcro shoes. The employee we hire could even be the sort of person who, like me, forgets the price of a forty-ounce bottle of Miller Genuine Draft milliseconds after typing it into the cash register, as if the number never even existed in their brain. The only necessary qualification is that they must show up for work every day and not steal our money.
Kay puts an ad in the Korean newspaper, and applications soon start to flow in. Our first interviewee is a cheerful but somewhat down-on-his-luck-seeming middle-aged man whose bald pate and perpetual five o’clock shadow make him look like a Korean Homer Simpson. Because Koreans think it rude to ask someone their name until you know them well, he is simply known as The Man (ajashi). The Man has zero retail experience, but he used to be a computer programmer, which perhaps will translate into register skills. Also, he has a Social Security number and a pulse, so Kay hires him on the spot.
Things go well the first few days; The Man seems eager to please and won’t let anyone else do a speck of work while he’s on the job. But then he starts missing shifts, as if he’s suddenly decided that coming to work is, well, optional. “Oh, my stomach was hurting,” he tells Kay after not showing up one day. “I think I ate too much for breakfast.” Being the bighearted person she is, Kay gives him a second and a third chance; then, being a temperamental, no-nonsense businesswoman, she turns on him ferociously. She gives him the money he’s earned and kicks him out of the store in front of some disquieted-looking customers. The Man actually has the gall to look wounded as he walks out, but something tells me he’s experienced this before.
Our next hire is also a middle-aged Korean (“The Man II”), but temperamentally he could not be more different from The Man I. The Man II comes from a military background—he served both in the Korean and the U.S. armies—and has his shit wired alarmingly tight. Unfortunately, he’s also a bit opinionated.
“Who did you vote for in the last presidential election?” he demands of a shaggy young woman who came into the store to buy cat food.
“Um, Gore?” the surprised woman says.
“Ronald Reagan is the greatest president ever!” The Man II shouts at her, slamming her 9 Lives Liver and Bacon Dinner on the counter. Later he questions the patriotism of a customer who tries to buy European beer and accuses Dwayne of stealing, and before he can inflict any more damage Kay jettisons him as well.
Our third hire, The Woman (ajuma), has no problem showing up for work and does not have a personality like weed killer. Her only drawback is that she seems to have misled the employment agency about her age, which listed her as a mere fifty-five, the same age as Kay. Now, some Asians do tend to age well (studies show that Korean-American women live longer than any ethnic group in the country), but there’s simply no way this woman was born after the fall of the Chosun dynasty (1392–1910).
“Oh my God,” gasps Gab after watching The Woman totter around the checkout area. “She’s too frail to work in a convenience store.” The Woman looks like one of those sweet little grannies driving a Buick through a crowd of pedestrians in the parking lot at the mall.
“Ready for work, boss!” she announces with crushing enthusiasm every time she sees me. (This might be the only English she knows.) We position her next to the register and forbid her to go anywhere else, lest a roll of toilet paper fall off the shelf and break one of her collarbones. For a few days we watch as revenue inexplicably plummets during her shifts, until we realize that she’s handing out change like a broken slot machine. So we try giving her a box of drinks