My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [41]
“MR. CHOW!” I shriek while holding my now-misshapen head in my hands.
But he’s already gone, fleeing out the front door faster than I would have thought him capable.
“What is it?” says Dwayne, hurrying back from the register. Initially he sees the incident as amusing, but after a few days, when Mr. Chow doesn’t return, he grows concerned and says that when Mr. Chow finally shows his face I should be nice to him, because “what he was doing he’s only been doing for about twenty years.”
Mr. Chow, however, never comes back.
WE ARE HAPPY TO SERVE YOU
WHEN WE FIRST MOVED INTO SALIM’S STORE, I WAS TERRIFIED to touch one bag of peanuts or modify the arrangement of Pringles cans, lest we upset our longtime customers. But eventually it feels safe for some minor changes, like shifting the bread rack a few inches to the left so that people standing at the ATM don’t block traffic exiting the beer section, and hanging the display of lottery numbers in the front window instead of next to the cash register. These are small changes, trivial changes, the kind of adjustments surely no one will notice.
They notice.
“So,” says Mr. Leventhal, a school principal who lives in a brownstone on Pacific Street, “I see you put your trash to the right of the basement door instead of the left.”
“How come you put the Bud Light on the bottom shelf?” growls a half-joking off-duty police officer with his gun still holstered. “Now I gotta bend all the way over to get my beer. Damn!”
“WHERE ARE THE BRAN MUFFINS?” bellows a lawyerly looking man with headphone wires streaming out from his camel-hair earmuffs. “IF YOU PUT THE BRAN MUFFINS UNDER THE CORN MUFFINS I MIGHT NOT SEE THEM, AND THEN I WILL GET REALLY REALLY TENSE. DO YOU UNDERSTAND? PLEASE PUT THE BRAN MUFFINS WHERE THEY HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AND DO NOT CHANGE THEIR LOCATION AGAIN. EVER. THANK YOU.”
I’m starting to wonder if we own the store or the store owns us. Nobody cried after Salim departed (and nobody would if we did either), but God help us if we try to change one thing about the deli he left behind.
Certain customers really stress me out, especially a group of RNs from the nursing home down the block. Apparently taking care of their patients isn’t keeping these women very busy, because they have time to sit around compiling a database of every price that has ever been charged for any item at any convenience store in Brooklyn, going back to the beginning of time. They use their universal price database to expose us as carpetbaggers and interlopers.
“Seventy-nine cents for a can of tu-NA?! ‘Twas only seventy-five cents THREE WEEKS AGO! You raisin’ de prices here, mistah?”
The irony of it is, we aren’t raising prices. Kay hates the idea—she’s the sort of person who keeps her own universal price database, and as a store manager her first priority is: How can I keep my prices low? But Salim’s prices are from a different era. He charged people nothing, even by Brooklyn standards: two dollars for a cheese sandwich, a dollar for a beer, sixty cents for a cup of coffee. A store can’t stay frozen in time any more than a neighborhood can or a city can. Does anyone expect New York to stop changing?
“Don’t mind the Rastafarians,” Dwayne says of the nurses. “Instead of worrying about what we charge for peanuts, they should be tryin’ to figure out how come their patients all look like this.” He grabs his neck with both hands and makes a gasping noise while sticking his tongue out.
Of course, Dwayne himself has ideas about what things should cost. For instance, not long after we bought the store, Dwayne told Gab that every sandwich had to have at least .37 pounds of meat.
“Point-three-seven?” said Gab. “According to who?”
“Everyone!