My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store (15 page)

But there were differences between us as well. In U of C–speak, Gab was more of a Lockean liberal, whereas I fell more into the Marxist-Rousseauian collectivist camp. Also, even when she was
attempting to goof off in her decadent phase, Gab generally went to class, and thus received much better grades.

The most obvious difference between us was our backgrounds, of course. Whereas Gab had been born on the other side of the world, in Daegu, South Korea, I had exited the womb just a hundred or so miles away, at a nice little summer town my parents used to visit in upper Michigan. And whereas Gab was on significant student aid, I didn’t even have a clue about the way a Pell Grant worked. These contrasts were important in that they seemed to promise a lifetime of shared surprises. For even though stability-oriented people like Gab and me are probably destined to settle down early and bore even ourselves, marriage needs surprises—although, truth be told, they need not go as far as buying a deli.

Tonight we’ve agreed not to discuss the store, which means that after the obligatory reminiscing is over, we run out of things to talk about. The store, I realize, has completely taken over our lives.

Then Gab seems to snap out of her funk and pushes aside her glass.

“I want to ask you something,” she says. “To be celebrating our tenth anniversary tells us something, right? That our relationship is strong, yes? That despite all the challenges we’ve put up with recently, you and me, we’re holding up?”

I nod somewhat reluctantly, because I have a feeling Gab is about to tell me something I don’t want to hear.

“I’m glad you feel that way,” she continues, “because as you know, I did some accounting today, and I don’t know how to say this, but things at the store don’t look so good.”

Uh-oh
. I knew it.

“How bad is it?” I ask, putting down my burger.

“Bad,” she says. “Really bad.” Her explanation goes something like this:

We had thought that the store was off to a decent start, because
every day we looked at the receipts and saw figures that more or less jibed with what Salim promised us, namely, revenue of around two thousand dollars a day. Sure, some days were disappointing, but if Gab’s calculations held up, our debts would be paid off in a few months and we could get our money back and move on.

But the thing about business is that, like anything else, it takes a while to figure out how you’re
really
doing. You’re like a pilot whose dashboard instruments don’t function until the plane has reached cruising altitude—you don’t know how fast you’re going, how high you are, or how close you are to stalling and dropping out of the sky. There just isn’t enough information, and what there is you don’t know how to interpret. Furthermore, beginner’s errors distort the picture. In our case, the cash register work has been so riddled with mistakes that on some days we essentially have no idea how much business we really did. And ballpark guesses often turn out to be rosy-picture guesses.

Yet no matter how mixed the evidence, to a fledgling entrepreneur the future always looks shiny and bright, doesn’t it? You’re in business, you have a store, and it has customers, which might seem like modest accomplishments, but it’s the beginning and it’s hard not to succumb to the delusion that things can only get better. For instance, just the other day we had one of our best shifts—a Saturday in which we made almost twenty-five hundred dollars—and afterward I couldn’t help predicting to Gab that by summer the store would be making double that.

That was a Saturday, though, and Saturdays are always going to be the best day of the week for a store that devotes almost a quarter of its space to beer. Sundays aren’t bad, either, because of people stocking up on groceries for the week, but Mondays are the worst and also when bills start to arrive, and this being the end of the month, invoices have been raining down like bombs all week—a thousand dollars for orange juice, two thousand for lottery tickets,
three thousand for rent. Some of our suppliers, it’s becoming clear, have contributed to our misapprehension of financial well-being by giving us steep discounts on our first shipments of ice cream or whatever, and postponing their first bills. Now, however, it’s all coming due and adding up to a stupendous debt, on top of the debt we already have.

“We’re in a hole,” Gab says. “There’s no money in the bank, and based on my calculations, we owe our creditors more than I can see coming in. And we have things like tax coming up.”

“What do you mean tax? It’s only February.”

“Sales tax, stupid, not income tax. As a business, you have to pay sales tax every three months. Our assessment is coming in a few weeks, and if my calculations are correct, it will be another few thousand dollars.”

“A few thousand dollars?!” The lethargy has worn off. A new feeling has entered my body—not panic or despair, but something more like the shock of being diagnosed with a serious illness. How would we pay off Salim and our other debts if there wasn’t money coming in—not now and apparently not for quite a while?
Our business is
sick—isn’t that what Gab is saying? We’re in danger of becoming one of those stillborn, turn-your-head-away stores that close right after opening. We’d been counting on the deli to pay off our debts, but instead those debts have increased, and now, like any insolvent enterprise, we’ll shortly be shutting down.

For a moment I feel almost overwhelmed. Then it occurs to me that
this
is what I had been craving—namely, risk and consequences. The real. Vital contact. And despite the chill in the bar (all of New York seems to be frozen right now, as the commerce-killing cold spell goes on and on), I suddenly feel hot with shame. The folly of it all! The way I invested what should have been a dispassionate business decision with foolish emotions and ideals! But it soon passes,
in part because I notice that Gab is staring at me with an oddly composed expression.

“Why aren’t you freaking out?” I ask her.

“Because I have a plan,” she says confidently.

I look at her in terror. A plan? But of course—I should have known. Gab and her plans. She proceeds to take out a hard copy of the spreadsheet she’s been working on all day and outline the sort of brutal austerity program University of Chicago economists used to be famous for imposing on Third World economies. The plan has several components, which she ticks off one by one after ordering another drink. The first is:

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.

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 head in the refrigerator, or had it happened gradually, by stealth? This was supposed to be a temporary gig, and a reluctant one at that, to appease my long-suffering wife. At some point, though, deeper convictions had come dangerously into play. Maybe it was ambivalence about my “real job,” which was nothing of the sort. The
Paris Review
was not a real place—or at least sometimes that’s how it felt. It was fantasy, a make-believe world (poems! stories!) inside a bubble of privilege. It survived by existing in a
gravityless world (“society” and “the arts”) where the normal laws of supply and demand did not apply.

The deli was an antidote: pure struggle. Which brought about the biggest seduction of all: rash and imprudent action. The Hail Mary pass that rescues us all. There was also a certain Calvinistic tendency to see salvation as coming through work and family, which is something Puritans share with Koreans, and as we look to survive this period of crisis, I find myself clutching those twin talismans to get us through.

THE THING ABOUT
an austerity program is that it has to be enforced, but in a family business no one is the boss; or, rather, everyone is. Gab’s solution is a voluntary system of fines: screw up at the register, owe the difference. Get a health code violation, pay it yourself.

“This is absurd,” I protest. “I refuse to participate in a kangaroo court.”

“I thought you were committed to saving the store. I’m doing it. My mother’s doing it.”

“But you’re not the ones getting fined!” Which is true. Whereas the two of them have spotless records, Kay has already reported me to Gab once for accepting a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill and twice for not wearing those ridiculous cellophane gloves for making sandwiches, and meanwhile she’s been eyeballing me constantly for signs that I’m sneaking food off the shelves. (Which of course I am. I refuse to give up one of my last sources of pleasure, though technically this makes me guilty of shoplifting in my own store.)

The tension becomes essentially unbearable when we close for renovations. I’ve been looking forward to renovating since we opened, seeing it as a turning point—maybe
the
turning point—in the transformation from gnarly bodega into trendy gourmet market. My plan is to repair the hole in the ceiling, retile the dishwater-colored
floor and rearrange the refrigerators to make walking through the aisles less like squeezing into an airplane bathroom. I’d also like to spruce up the place by installing some lighting that doesn’t come from fluorescent tubes and putting in a window so we can occasionally circulate the air. It’s a lot to accomplish, but I figure we can get it done in a week if everyone pitches in.

Kay, however, gives us only one day, and this amounts to a bitter concession on her part, because originally she wanted to close the store for only a single shift.

“No time for make pretty,” she insists, as if what I want is to paint the store pink and decorate it with flowers. “We need to be making money every day, every hour.” She doesn’t say this in a greedy way; she says it in a feverish, panicked way. It’s not just the bills she’s worried about; she thinks that if we close for any significant length of time we will permanently lose more of our regular customers.

Nothing gets on my nerves like Kay’s impatience. The second she thinks of something it has to be done, usually by herself. She’s a compulsive nonprocrastinator: waiting isn’t in her repertoire, and idleness, the act of not doing anything (which many people know by the term “relaxing”) causes her actual physical pain. “I do anything not to be the lazy person,” she says. “If I’m not doing something all the time, whole body hurt, feel like sick or something. Want to die.” And since her internal clock runs somewhere between an hour and a whole day ahead of the rest of the planet (she routinely shows up early for things normal people tend to avoid, like car inspections and dentist appointments; once she got fined by the sanitation department for putting her garbage out too soon), there’s no way to keep her satisfied unless you, too, are the kind of person who does all your Christmas shopping in September.