My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [68]
However, new threats have begun to appear around us, including the arrival of two new convenience stores in the neighborhood and a sudden barrage of ambush-style government inspections. This spring we’ve been visited by undercover NYPD officers trying to catch us selling liquor on Sundays before noon (11:57 A.M., to be precise); Consumer Affairs personnel trying to catch us selling cigarettes and lottery tickets to minors; Consumer Affairs, again, seeing if we pad our scales or use a cat to catch mice; even the Drug Enforcement Agency, looking for contraband sales of cold medicine. No one has caught us yet, in part because Dwayne has an uncanny feel for when an inspection is under way. (It’s a sixth sense, and goes with his ability to look at someone and tell if they’ve been to prison. I have a sixth sense too, but it isn’t much use at the deli: I can look at someone and tell if they’ve been to boarding school.) However, it’s only a matter of time before they do. And when it happens, it has the potential to be devastating, because like everything in New York, the city’s fines are murderously expensive.
Kay is particularly worried, since a few months ago an old friend of hers from Seoul who owns a deli in the Village called and asked if she wanted to buy his business. No thanks, she said, my hands are already full, but why are you selling? After all, the man owned a successful store, and to show off how proud of it he was, he had given it the kind of name it deserved, like the Garden of V.I.P.’s Diamond Deli, or something along those lines.
As it turned out, the deli’s awning, with its boisterous name followed by a long list of products the store sold, caused it to violate Paragraph A of Section 52-542 of the New York City Zoning Resolution, which forbids business from creating “visual clutter.” The fine was twenty-five hundred dollars. The cost of replacing the flashy old awning with a more demure one amounted to five thousand more. This, coming on top of endless violations that no one could remember anyone ever being cited for, like having spoons positioned incorrectly in the potato salad (for some reason they’re supposed to face down), and others that he couldn’t control, like litter outside his door, had convinced the man that it was time to get out of the deli business.
He isn’t alone. All spring we’ve been hearing about store owners hit by obscure and unreasonable fines. New York always increases its collection of things like parking tickets when the economy slows, and with the city now in its second year of recession following September 11, there are fewer tourists and less in the way of Wall Street profits to pump up revenue. Ninety percent of the city’s businesses—about 220,000, all told—employ fewer than thirty people, and the government is saying to them, We need you to contribute a greater share.
Puritans and their descendants tend to be pro-authority by nature. They’re into structure and consensus; they like doing things as a collective, like group prayer and public stoning. Even when they were taking the radical, ultimately suicidal (for many in the group) step of abandoning Mother England to follow their religious convictions, the Pilgrims did so as a nice, orderly club, spending years meticulously planning their escape. Once they got to Plymouth, they set up a government that was no champion of individual liberty, either. They liked to intrude on one another’s affairs, sending tax collectors and the equivalent of child welfare inspectors into their own homes with onerous frequency. Unlike Thomas Jefferson’s belief that a government’s job is to do as little as possible, the Puritans were the sort of people who believed that society was at its best when smothered within a government bear hug.
Growing up, I had