My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [78]
“You try to tip?” she cackled.
I was ready to pass it off with a casual remark about the winter dryness numbing my fingertips, but for some reason I tensed up and couldn’t speak. The woman looked at me curiously, standing there with no sound coming out of my mouth. Why are you still here? her expression said. Go outside and think about Mommy! I gave you change—move on.
“I’m not a tourist!” I almost shouted at her then.
But it was too late. Outside, I stood on the sidewalk feeling humbled, wondering when my next opportunity to prove myself to the city would come.
My mother-in-law, I’ve noticed, has a similar effect on people. She’s the archetype of a certain New Yorker who, whatever her actual story, is assumed to have sacrificed so much and worked so hard just to be here that it almost makes you defensive. Why are YOU here? What’s YOUR story? It’s not only people like Gab who struggle to live up to their parents’ example, in other words; it’s all of us. New York never lets you just sit there and relax. So many people are dying to get in, and willing to do almost anything to stay once they get here.
A MONTH AFTER Emo’s arrival I go with Kay to Jetro, a grocery wholesaler on the Brooklyn waterfront. Jetro is the deli mother ship, a giant warehouse filled with cat food, Cheez Curls, phone cards to every country in the developing world, and a few dozen middle-aged men wearing clothes they’ve obviously slept in. It’s like Costco or Wal-Mart but dirtier and without frills like air-conditioning or pest control. The aisle signs are in English, Korean, Spanish and Arabic, although reading them can be difficult no matter what your nationality, because Jetro skimps on lighting, too.
We have with us our official Jetro member’s ID, which identifies us as deli owners. (As if by looking in our half-closed, bloodshot eyes you couldn’t tell.) The general public is not allowed in. Jetro’s prices are a cut below what you find at most wholesalers, but what attracts deli owners from all over the city is not its discounting, which isn’t all that remarkable. The reason Jetro exists is to cut out deliverymen, the short-range truckers who haul goods from the storage centers to the convenience stores. Deliverymen cause headaches; in addition to bullying the store owners (as in the case of the snack cake thugs), they always manage to bring that emergency shipment of toilet paper you paid a premium express delivery rate for two days after you run out. And of course they charge a percentage. Jetro not only eliminates the percentage, it gives deli owners the “freedom” to fill their own shelves with whatever they want, whenever they want it. Meaning, of course, you get to be your own deliveryman.
Whether this is a good idea for the deli owners is an entirely separate matter. Small business people would always rather do things themselves. That’s their nature. But a deliveryman has a truck—that’s one thing you pay him for—and a deliveryman also gets paid to sacrifice his lumbar discs and groin muscles. Jetro knows exactly how its independently minded clientele thinks, and its attitude is You want to do it? Here’s a shipping container—unload it yourself, and try not to get run over by a forklift. The result is like a reality game show—Shop to Death!—in which contestants try to navigate an obstacle course seeded with challenges intended to maim and/or humiliate them.
When we arrive at the waterfront I attempt to park as close to the entrance as possible, so that afterward we won’t have to haul our “U-boat” (what Jetro calls its industrial cast-iron shopping carts) across Jetro’s pothole-riddled lot. But there are no spaces except in a loading zone, which Kay, sitting in