My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [50]
We’re going to be living in Kay’s basement awhile longer. “How long?” I ask. “I don’t know,” says Gab. “There are a lot of people the store owes money to, and we’re at the back of the line.” In other words, until we pay off the orange juice guy, Chucho, Glenda the lottery saleswoman, the snack cake thugs and the rest of them, I will not be sleeping aboveground. And since paying them off means fixing the store first, that seems like it could take a long time indeed.
We’re going to have to continue working at the store—in fact, we probably have to work there more. This is automatic as long as we’re living with Gab’s parents. How can we ignore a crisis while it’s going on in the same house? Gab will continue doing daily shifts while taking care of things like accounting, and I’ll go from four shifts a week to five, primarily at night. There is one change, though: until now Gab has been paying us all minimum wage. Now we’ll be working out of the goodness of our hearts—that is, providing free labor at a store we supposedly own.
Also, no more free food. No more eating off the shelves. Consuming your own product may be cheaper than paying full price, but there’s a cost to it nonetheless, and once you start doing it, your coworkers do it, and pretty soon your customers do it as well. Yet it’s a hard impulse to control. Here you are in a virtual jail cell created by beer and snacks that you bought. How can you not feel entitled to a little sampling? (Though I’m not a junk food fiend, I find myself tortured by a desire to sample all the various Hostess and Entenmann’s snacks I haven’t tasted since childhood—Sno-Balls! Donettes! Guava Cheese Puffs!—a craving I certainly would not feel if I did not have to look at them all day.) In fact, to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure I can carry out this plank of the austerity program.
But it’s the next part that really stings. For the last few weeks I have been scrutinizing our customers, analyzing our inventory and gauging the flow of money throughout the day, all the while becoming more convinced that the store must radically overhaul its inventory. If we can’t serve two populations with different tastes—and we can’t, because our space is too small—then we have to go with the one that appears to command the neighborhood’s future. That would be the crowd at Sonny’s, the people buying sorbet, sourdough baguettes and veggie burgers. It’s not an issue of what I like to eat. If Boerum Hill was becoming Hasidic, I tell myself, then we’d find a way to serve kosher food; ditto if it was becoming Albanian or Sri Lankan or Korean, for that matter. As it happens, the people taking over Boerum Hill have the same taste in food as my own, a fact that will truly mark us as boneheaded if we don’t adapt to the change.
Gab had accepted this—unlike her mother or me, she was agnostic on the issue of inventory—but requested that the process proceed in a timely and sensitive fashion. An item here, an item there. No more big changes when it comes to products like coffee. If we could afford to get rid of the lottery machine, then it would go last.
Now, though, she insists that the process come to a complete halt until our money woes get resolved. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I know this interferes with your plan.” Her mother, too, is henceforth to stop making changes. What this means is that Gab and I aren’t just stuck in the basement and stuck working as checkout clerks; we’re stuck in that scruffy milieu of lottery tickets, wine coolers and penny candy—trapped in Salim’s deli, as it were, rather than the deli I had envisioned it becoming. This, to my surprise, I find the most intolerable aspect of the entire situation.
C IS FOR “COOKIE”
DRIVING TO BROOKLYN THE NEXT DAY, I FIND MYSELF ASKING, When did I get so emotionally invested in the deli? Was it the moment I stuck my