My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [43]
Not that she thinks all food is the same. As much as any shopkeeper, Kay cares about things like how much a product costs and how well it sells. Profit margins are hugely important, and in general, the more likely a product is to give you cancer or a heart attack, the worse its profit margin is. Colt 45, for example, is widely known as a scourge not just on individual consumers but on whole inner city communities, being essentially liquid crack. However, it’s also a scourge on convenience store owners, thanks to the fact that the beermaker’s highly popular 16-ounce bottles (aka “double-deuces”) come with a ninety-nine-cent price preprinted right on the label, leaving the store owner zero latitude for dealing with what may be higher business costs in his or her area. (For us, double-deuces have a profit margin of around 10 percent, compared to 30 percent or higher for most kinds of alcohol.) Other products that employ this form of screw-the-retailer pricing include Doritos, Twinkies and Wonder Bread.
In addition to health food having higher profits than stuff made by the behemoths of the food industry, groceries tend to have higher profit margins than snacks, all of which Kay notices—but again, the idea of not selling Doritos, Twinkies or even Colt 45 seems antithetical to what she knows about American tastes. I need to show her that Americans are gradually learning to eat more than just junk food, because for now the only one she sees doing it is me, and sometimes I think that’s worse than no one at all.
BEFORE WE BOUGHT the store I knew Boerum Hill was a mixed neighborhood, but as it turns out, according to the last census, the area around Salim’s store is almost evenly divided between whites and nonwhites. One way of looking at this is that we’ve achieved the American social ideal, a perfect demographic balance, like in the happy pictures you see in college brochures. Another way is that we’ve placed ourselves in the nightmare situation of having to make a choice between serving one population or the other, without ever satisfying both.
More and more I’ve been feeling like it’s the latter, and wondering why we didn’t recognize it as such before it was too late. Everyone says, “Look, Boerum Hill is gentrified,” but really it depends what time you’re there. During the day, people of all backgrounds are out on the street, having come to work at one of the big employers nearby, like the jail or the Department of Education. Also, during the day, people who live in the neighborhood go off to work in the city. At night you see a more accurate representation of who really lives here, but people tend to cluster—residents of the projects over by the canal, say, and residents of Smith Street in the bars. These groups might not even see each other, except at a place like our store.
We get a sampling of the whole neighborhood because we’re right on the way to the Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway station. When we were looking at the store, I didn’t pay attention to the housing projects because they’re four blocks away, and they have their own row of convenience stores right across the street. But this is the first deli you pass if you’re coming from the subway station to the projects, and again, it’s one of the only delis in the neighborhood with a lottery machine. There’s also Dwayne, Dwayne’s sandwiches and the television, all of which ensures that the older residents keep coming.
The problem is that we don’t have infinite space and can’t stock everyone’s favorite products. In fact, we barely have enough space to serve anyone. We could try upgrading the inventory and see if it catches on with the old crowd, but I’m pretty sure our old customers aren’t the sort to switch to twelve-dollar bottles of Belgian Trappist beer. They’re the sort of people who drink Budweiser from the can—through a straw.
Again,