My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store

by Ben Ryder Howe

  “You brought your date to the deli?” says Dwayne. “What, AutoZone was closed? The bait-and-tackle store had a velvet rope?”

  “Shut up, Dwayne,” says Floyd, not laughing. The woman’s name is Audra, and not only is she exceedingly lovely, she acts as if there’s nowhere else in the world she’d rather be than a sausage party at the deli, and the regulars treat her with respect and adoration. Floyd, in turn, positively glows, and refrains from peppering me with his usual taunts. I let him put two big cans of Japanese beer on his “tab.”

  Later, after the regulars have finally left, that feeling of poise and tranquillity I experienced at the start of the shift begins to return. Late at night, when Brooklyn is so quiet that you feel like you’re tucking the city into bed, back in the stockroom I begin filling a noisy plastic bucket with steaming water and what’s left of a jug of Pine-Sol (which, no matter how much you put on, never seems to make much of a difference on those gray tiles, but maybe it would be worse if we didn’t at least try to clean them), and as I’m bumping around in the murk I accidentally step on somebody’s hand or foot, a body bedded down in the corner among the empty cardboard boxes. After yelping in surprise or pain, a dumpling-shaped old man with a Fu Manchu rises from the recycling area.

  “Mr. Chow,” I say tersely. “You startled me.”

  As usual at this point in the evening, Mr. Chow doesn’t say anything, just grins, but then he starts making a motion like he’s going to leave.

  “You can stay there all night if you want, Mr. Chow. I’ll leave off the burglar alarm. I just need another jug of Pine-Sol.” Using a footstool, I reach up to a high shelf, attempting to coax a bottle that must weigh fifteen pounds into falling, when POW! Something—not the Pine-Sol—hits me right between the eyes, then bounces from my face to the ground, where it shatters. Wincing, and checking my forehead for blood, I hear the distinctly recognizable sound of a glass bottle—another one, not the one that already fell—rolling down a wooden shelf, picking up speed, and then POW! I look up just in time for another direct hit, this time right on the boniest part of the supraorbital ridge. What kind of barrage is this? I think, cowering, as two more strikes glance off my shoulder. Broken glass is now all over the stockroom, but not all the projectiles have shattered, and as I look down I see one of them spinning on the stockroom floor: a Guinness bottle, empty. Who would think to put empties in such a place, where eventually they’d be dislodged and rain down like meteorites? Who?!

  “MR. CHOW!” I shriek while holding my now-misshapen head in my hands.

  But he’s already gone, fleeing out the front door faster than I would have thought him capable.

  “What is it?” says Dwayne, hurrying back from the register. Initially he sees the incident as amusing, but after a few days, when Mr. Chow doesn’t return, he grows concerned and says that when Mr. Chow finally shows his face I should be nice to him, because “what he was doing he’s only been doing for about twenty years.”

  Mr. Chow, however, never comes back.

  WE ARE HAPPY TO SERVE YOU

  WHEN WE FIRST MOVED INTO SALIM’S STORE, I WAS TERRIFIED to touch one bag of peanuts or modify the arrangement of Pringles cans, lest we upset our longtime customers. But eventually it feels safe for some minor changes, like shifting the bread rack a few inches to the left so that people standing at the ATM don’t block traffic exiting the beer section, and hanging the display of lottery numbers in the front window instead of next to the cash register. These are small changes, trivial changes, the kind of adjustments surely no one will notice.

  They notice.

  “So,” says Mr. Leventhal, a school principal who lives in a brownstone on Pacific Street, “I see you put your trash to the right of the basement door instead of the left.”

  “How come you put the Bud Light on the bottom shelf?” growls a half-joking off-duty police officer with his gun still holstered. “Now I gotta bend all the way over to get my beer. Damn!”

  “WHERE ARE THE BRAN MUFFINS?” bellows a lawyerly looking man with headphone wires streaming out from his camel-hair earmuffs. “IF YOU PUT THE BRAN MUFFINS UNDER THE CORN MUFFINS I MIGHT NOT SEE THEM, AND THEN I WILL GET REALLY REALLY TENSE. DO YOU UNDERSTAND? PLEASE PUT THE BRAN MUFFINS WHERE THEY HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AND DO NOT CHANGE THEIR LOCATION AGAIN. EVER. THANK YOU.”

  I’m starting to wonder if we own the store or the store owns us. Nobody cried after Salim departed (and nobody would if we did either), but God help us if we try to change one thing about the deli he left behind.

  Certain customers really stress me out, especially a group of RNs from the nursing home down the block. Apparently taking care of their patients isn’t keeping these women very busy, because they have time to sit around compiling a database of every price that has ever been charged for any item at any convenience store in Brooklyn, going back to the beginning of time. They use their universal price database to expose us as carpetbaggers and interlopers.

  “Seventy-nine cents for a can of tu-NA?! ‘Twas only seventy-five cents THREE WEEKS AGO! You raisin’ de prices here, mistah?”

  The irony of it is, we aren’t raising prices. Kay hates the idea—she’s the sort of person who keeps her own universal price database, and as a store manager her first priority is: How can I keep my prices low? But Salim’s prices are from a different era. He charged people nothing, even by Brooklyn standards: two dollars for a cheese sandwich, a dollar for a beer, sixty cents for a cup of coffee. A store can’t stay frozen in time any more than a neighborhood can or a city can. Does anyone expect New York to stop changing?

  “Don’t mind the Rastafarians,” Dwayne says of the nurses. “Instead of worrying about what we charge for peanuts, they should be tryin’ to figure out how come their patients all look like this.” He grabs his neck with both hands and makes a gasping noise while sticking his tongue out.

  Of course, Dwayne himself has ideas about what things should cost. For instance, not long after we bought the store, Dwayne told Gab that every sandwich had to have at least .37 pounds of meat.

  “Point-three-seven?” said Gab. “According to who?”

  “Everyone!” said Dwayne. “Just ask—a sandwich has to have point-three-seven pounds of meat. Otherwise it’s not a sandwich.”

  A third of a pound of meat—Jesus, no wonder Dwayne’s sandwiches are so popular. With a third of a pound of meat—plus all the extra layers of cheese, toppings and vegetables Dwayne likes to throw on, all wrapped up in a freshly baked hero—you can feed a whole family, and at our store no one ever gets charged more than six dollars (usually more like five). Moreover, you get the added value of Dwayne’s performance. Dwayne likes to make sandwich-making sound like thunder, the way he karate-chops the paper off the roll, slams the refrigerator doors and tosses the serrated knife in the metal sink. His sandwiches look like if you launched them on the East River, they would fail to pass beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. Customers, unaware of the Pavlovian response he’s induced, pace back and forth, eyes abulge, peeking tippy-toe over the counter. They’re in a trance. By the time they get to the register they’ve lost the ability to speak and can barely mumble “Howmuchizzit?” Sometimes they don’t even get both feet out on the sidewalk before they start tearing off the sandwich paper and eating like grizzly bears, trying to stretch their jaws around that enormous bun. If I were from the neighborhood I’d live on Dwayne’s sandwiches, especially now that it’s wintertime and the price of everything is going up.

  This is something I never noticed before: how much weather affects prices. We’re in the midst of New York’s coldest winter in a decade. There’s a city-wide shortage of long underwear and even, according to the newspaper, rats, which are being driven deeper underground. Since not just New York but the whole East Coast is frozen, the price of orange juice has nearly doubled, and dairy prices have shot up as well, which affects things like cheese and ice cream. This comes during a year in which New York food prices on the whole are going up by 9 percent, three times the
rest of the nation. And there’s been yet another increase in the cigarette tax (by a dollar) and the city’s first property tax increase in ten years, by the largest margin ever. Renting an apartment in New York is also getting more expensive, by 8 percent, double the rest of the country. Meanwhile, wages in New York are actually falling, and for the first time in eight years the transit authority wants to raise the subway fare—by fifty cents, its largest increase in history. New York has always been a cruelly expensive city, no doubt, but even longtime New Yorkers say they’ve never seen anything like this. No, if I lived in Boerum Hill, I would definitely shop at our store.

  OR WOULD I?

  One day I go to the other deli on our block, a store known as Sonny’s. Sonny’s is a one-minute walk from us, so sometimes it feels like we’re competing with them. We’re not. Sonny’s owns the market in nondairy milk, sorbet and real cheese. They’re the deli for organic, local and handmade food. And whereas our store rarely receives more than a few customers per hour from the neighborhood’s young bohemian cohort, Sonny’s is always full of people who look like they’re on their way to a Weezer concert. The jealousy I experience is like a punch in the gut. The customers carry handbaskets overloaded with expensive groceries and are lost in a quiet state of purposeful browsing, so much so that the only noise is people bumping into each other to get in line. (“Oh, did I cut you?” “No, you go first!” “No, I insist—your basket is heavier.”)

  Afterward I try to get Kay to go over to Sonny’s.

  “For what?” she asks skeptically. “To see who?”

  “Hipsters.”

  “Hamsters? You mean from New Hampshire?” She refuses. We argue. I introduce her to sorbet, Havarti and fresh sourdough. She likes all three but remains unconvinced.

  This is what Gab means by her mother’s business philosophy resembling her driving philosophy: as Kay sees it, if you have a strategy that works—a lane that gets you where you want to go—you stick with it. And what Kay knows is that Americans like a steady diet of soda, chips and sugary snacks—the more processed, the better. She doesn’t see the point in being one of those cars that swerve all over the road, changing lanes and slamming on the brakes, which happens to be precisely how her son-in-law drives.

  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, a store can’t stay the same, any more than a city can. Things have to change.

  “Maybe the solution is to go one step at a time and see what happens, not try to do anything drastic,” I tell Gab.

  This is how I end up trying to change our coffee.

  SALIM’S COFFEE IS popular and tastes horrible—to me, anyway. I say this not as someone who refuses to drink anything but Jamaican Blue Mountain or coffee produced on collectively owned farms with ecologically responsible land tenure systems in countries that provide universal pre-K-through-3 education and have no military. I’d like to be that kind of consumer, but I don’t have the will or the money. What I am is someone who likes coffee to taste like coffee, whereas Salim’s coffee tastes like a scientist’s attempt to create coffee without coffee beans, using something weird like flavor crystals. The company that makes it, called CaféAmerica, besides having the inspiring patriotism I love to see in my food, specializes, according to its brochure, in coffee “for large offices and other institutional settings.” It’s the sort of coffee that is so bad it actually tastes better when combined with the tangy aftertaste of a Styrofoam cup. Teachers’ lounges and “breakfast nooks”—that’s what the smell reminds me of. Nonetheless, Salim’s coffee does have its fans, which may have something to with its cattle prod–like effect on the human nervous system and may also be connected with the fact that when you combine its non-coffee taste with two spoonfuls of sugar and milk, it tastes exactly like … sugar and milk. It’s also really really cheap, and for us the profit margin isn’t bad. But I think I can get us a better profit margin and sell even more cups by replacing CaféAmerica with a Brooklyn-based company called Houston Brothers, which roasts its own coffee using quality beans and offers an inexpensive commercial blend that tastes like real coffee but isn’t overly strong and, best of all, will require us to raise the price of a small cup by only ten cents.

  Kay isn’t enthusiastic. Nevertheless, she reluctantly allows me to go ahead and make the change, perhaps because she knows that before I get anywhere I’ll have to deal with Willy Loman.

  GAB AND I started calling the sales rep for CaféAmerica Willy Loman because
he seemed to have stepped right out of a manual for the Dale Carnegie school of salesmanship. Sixtyish and bespectacled, with a square briefcase and unfashionable trenchcoat, he would often say optimistic, gung ho things that seemed at odds with his humdrum appearance. It was tempting—too tempting—to view him as a figure from a bygone era. Beneath the bland exterior he was all tenacity and fight, and he would claw for every inch of his surely shrinking territory.

  The next time he comes in, I’m waiting for him with the bad news: we’re changing the coffee. However, before I can give him the elaborate speech I’ve prepared, I have already lost control of the meeting, as Willy Loman grabs my outstretched hand and drags me into the corner of the store for a confidential powwow. It’s not clear why he’s whispering until I realize that without wanting to be, I’ve been forced to become his ally.

  “So, are your enjoying the coffee?” he asks confidently.

  I lie and say yes. I don’t have the courage to tell him I hate his coffee. My argument for getting rid of CaféAmerica depends entirely on blaming other people for not liking it.

  “Splendid,” says Willy Loman, while scribbling on a clipboard. “I’ve got a whole shipment with your name on it in the warehouse. Is four boxes of Brown Gold too little?”

  Brown Gold? Is that the name of the blend CaféAmerica has been sending us?

  “Actually, I think you should hold off,” I say, my throat tightening, “for now.” Why can’t I be forthright? No stomach for conflict! No backbone! Stop being so polite for once in your life and say what you really want to say!

  Willy Loman knows what’s up, though, and refuses to acknowledge it.

  “Oh?” he says nonchalantly. “Would you prefer something else? I’ll just make it Donut Blend instead.” Without missing a beat, he scratches out what he just wrote on the clipboard and scribbles, “Donut Blend … six boxes.”