My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [96]
“You’re arrogant,” the guy with the bad facial hair who wouldn’t leave the store had shouted at me. “You’re judging people based on how they look.” And he was right: deciding whether to card someone is a kind of profiling. Unfortunately, I’m just not very good at it.
AROUND THIS TIME there’s a change in New York City’s official rules for street vendors, the people who sell things like hot dogs and roast nuts on the sidewalk (who presumably do it not because of a passion for the great outdoors but because they can’t afford actual stores). Since we’re not a street vendor, the change doesn’t affect us, but it’s worth mentioning because of what it says about the mentality of small business owners.
The change is an increase in the city’s fines for violations such as not wearing paper hats, standing a few inches (literally) too far from or too close to the curb, and leaving carts unattended while making bathroom visits. Overnight, the fines go up from two hundred and fifty dollars to one thousand, and since most vendors receive an average of seven violations a year—often three or four at once—many are facing ruin. (The kind of sudden and capricious ruin that the cart vendors, many having fled despotically run Third World countries, know all too well.) No public hearings or debates in the city council have been held on this calamitous change for twelve thousand or so of the city’s most economically challenged families. And the only way to fight the tickets is for the vendors to go to an obscure court called the Environmental Control Board, fill out forms and wait for hours while losing more money—this for people who epitomize the embattled yet scrappy New Yorker everyone claims to love. Some street vendors earn as little as thirty-five dollars a day.
Dread is the nature of small business. You’re gnawed by fear that something is going to come out of nowhere and flatten you before you’ve even had a chance to shout, whether it’s a blackout or a government inspector. The urge to seize control of your own destiny, even if it means doing your own precious business harm, can be difficult to resist.
“You cannot survive without tobacco, trust me,” says Habib, one of our cigarette suppliers, when I go to pick up smokes a few days after the sting. “It will be the end of your business.”
“Yes, but what are we going to do?” I reply somewhat desperately. We haven’t decided yet if we’re going to contest the violation or plead guilty. I ask Habib if he has any suggestions, and he shrugs. A leather-faced old man with an Abe Lincoln beard the color of a tangerine, he’s standing inside a steel cage lined with probably a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of tobacco—Mores, Vantages, Lucky Strikes, Virginia Slims. If you want to buy something you have to accompany him inside, where it’s actually quite comfortable—you can sit on a couch, watch TV, and get yourself something cold to drink from the refrigerator. (No smoking, though—a little fire could turn Habib’s cage into a tobacco-flavored human barbecue in about three seconds.)
“Why don’t you transfer the business to a relative?” says another deli owner who’s been standing there listening to our conversation. “Have the relative get new licenses for the tobacco and liquor, wait for the one-year probation to end, and then have the relative transfer the business back to you. Whenever people have trouble with the city that’s what they do.”
It’s not a crazy idea. Of course, by law you’re not allowed to sell a business for the purpose of evading punishment, but is the law ever enforced? According to Kay, until recently the city barely enforced any of its regulations governing the business of a convenience store, in contrast to now. And in a way, that approach