My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store (28 page)

“Did you get all that?” asks Gab, standing there looking doubtful with her hands planted on her hips. “I said there are three envelopes inside the safe, one for the garbage people, one for the bagel man, one for …” I nod at her and smile: Gab knows that I’m just as fast as her at the register now, and no more likely to screw up. If she tells me something, I usually remember to do it. This almost seems to irk her—she’s competitive, after all—and so now she’s trying to throw me off by hitting me with an extra data stream.

Meanwhile, two men walk into the store at the same time, one old, one young. They proceed directly to the checkout line, the young one first. What I notice about the young one: he’s clean-cut, taller than me (and I’m standing on a three-inch-high platform) and fidgety. What I notice about the older one is that he’s faded, disheveled and kind of lumpy—maybe a bum who after buying himself a beer intends to stand outside and harass the customers?

“…  and don’t forget to turn off lottery machine at ten o’clock,”
says Kay, “otherwise big problem happening. Okay? Come on, let’s go.” She and Gab leave the store for the night.

Less than a minute later, the young man arrives at the counter and asks for a pack of Newport Lights, “please.” Now, regular smokers don’t say “please.” They say “PACKANEWPORTS!” and flick a crumpled tenner on the counter. Therefore, I will now verify that this person is of legal age to buy tobacco products in the city of New York, even though the law states only that I have to card people who
look
younger than twenty-five (as if no one ever looked seven years younger than they really are).

However, just then Old Lumpy starts coughing obstreperously. In fact, he sounds as if he’s having some sort of asthma attack.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

He waves me off and seems to recover. I go back to the customer buying Newports, who’s waving a twenty at me and standing halfway through the door. Customers are shuffling their feet again, rolling their eyes at the delay.

“Can I see your—” I begin.

Old Lumpy then starts barking and flapping his arms.

“Is there a problem?” I ask. Lately there have been a lot of problem customers. I even had to call the police for the first time after a youngish fellow with annoying chin hair refused to stop screaming at me or leave the store because I made him show me ID for a pack of American Spirits. He said I was guilty of “age profiling” and threatened to expose me on his blog.

Again, Old Lumpy quiets down. But now the customers have rightly become annoyed, and one person has already put down their groceries and left. So I decide to take the younger man’s money without carding him (it doesn’t matter, I think, because if he’s under eighteen, then so am I), and as he’s walking through the door toward that knot of people I saw on the corner, I have one of those small moments of insight that usually get forgotten in the daily chaos of a
store. It occurs to me that the back of the neck is a really revealing part of the body: something about the combination of posture and muscle tone tells you as much about a person as their face, if not more. And as I watch the exit of this particular fellow, who’s wearing what I now recognize as the sort of overlarge blue oxford only a teenager would wear, I’m thinking,
Boy, he looks a lot younger from behind. I may have just dodged a bullet
.

The next thing I see is Old Lumpy’s hand holding up a detective’s badge. Almost immediately I get an out-of-body feeling, as if I’m watching this whole scene not through my own eyes but via a shaky handheld camera. And in my head a song begins to play—I can’t quite identify it at first, though I know I’ve heard it a thousand times.

Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?

It’s a sting, and we’re busted.

“Didn’t you see me signaling you?” Old Lumpy—Detective Lumpy, I should say—asks.

“Signal me? You mean with all that coughing and hand waving?”

“I was trying to tell you, ‘Don’t do it. Ask for ID. That boy’s under eighteen.’ ”

“You distracted me, that’s what you did.” My world is deflating, collapsing, running out of oxygen. That omniscience I felt a minute ago is morphing into fishbowl-head, wherein I feel uncomfortably aware of peripheral phenomena I can’t seem to focus on. It’s the same sweaty, off-balance, my-arms-are-too-long, the-world-is-moving-too-fast dysphoria I experienced during my very first shifts—combined with anger: hot, pulsing fury.

Detective Lumpy shrugs and hands me a sheaf of papers that I have to sign either admitting guilt or requesting a hearing before a judge. I can’t decide what to do, but as I’m flipping through I see a page with the vital statistics of the patsy, the customer who bought Newports. He’s not eighteen, it’s true. But he will be in four months.

“What, you couldn’t find someone whose eighteenth birthday is tomorrow?” I snap. “How about the center on the local high school basketball team? Just give him a cane and a fake beard and some orthopedic shoes.”

“What were you expecting?” Detective Lumpy snaps right back. “This is New York.”

He’s right: did I think they were going to send in Dorothy and Toto? Little Orphan Annie sucking a lollipop? Harry Potter?

“Besides,” he adds, “I didn’t need to do any of that. You were easy.” He tosses me the sheaf of paper and leaves. Out on the sidewalk, I watch him take out a Newport from the pack I just sold the boy in the oxford. Against the cobalt blue light of Brooklyn at dusk, its orange ember makes a brilliant contrast.

FOR YEARS NEW
York has had this ridiculous rule about not carding people unless they look college age or younger, but now I understand it. In a sense, everyone in New York is adept at visually processing strangers’ faces in a matter of seconds. We do it in the subway, we do it on the sidewalk, we do it in bars and restaurants. What’s the difference between those situations and the couple of seconds you have at the register to decide whether someone falls into that eighteen-to-twenty-five threshold?

One difference is that if you screw up while selling cigarettes, you can wreck your business and lose your livelihood. Because in keeping with its treasured image as the city that makes nice to no one, New York City metes out merciless punishment against businesses caught selling tobacco to minors: the first violation costs a thousand dollars or so, which for a deli owner can easily amount to a week’s profits. The second, if incurred during a two-year probationary period, costs a few thousand more plus the loss of the tobacco license
and
potentially the lottery machine, which will wipe out most stores like ours.

Of course, nothing could be more honorable than preventing children from smoking. But if the goal is so important, why not simply force everyone who buys tobacco to show their ID, which would eliminate innocent mistakes?

Maybe because such a system would be
too
effective. Convenience store clerks will never card everyone unless they have to, because it slows down the checkout line and incites a surprising number of people to raise trouble (apparently because they resent being told they look young). However, since they don’t want to make a deadly mistake, either, clerks come up with elaborate rules for who and who not to card, like
Has a walker. Talks about grandkids. Buys denture cream
. Now, call me cynical, but something tells me this is exactly what Big Tobacco would want, to have the convenience store clerks of America deciding who does and doesn’t get access to tobacco. Such a system would be designed to fail at least part of the time, would it not? And who would benefit? The tobacco companies, for one, and the agencies giving out fines, for another, both of which get to make money from tobacco sales while looking rightfully concerned about teen smoking.

One late night after the sting, in a fit of conspiracy-minded pique, I do some heavy-duty Googling to see if my theory has merit. Unfortunately, I can’t say that I find a smoking gun proving that Big Tobacco induced the government of New York City (or anywhere else with a similarly self-defeating law) to knowingly create flawed regulations. However, I can tell you that since at least the mid-1990s tobacco companies have been enmeshed in the crafting of legislation governing youth access to tobacco, and one of the things they’ve pushed hardest against is mandatory age verification. Not surprisingly, they want to appear as if they’re deeply concerned about teen smoking, so they publicly support “retraining programs” to “educate” retailers on how to prevent underage sales. Rather creepily, in fact, Philip Morris and the tobacco companies
actually administer “We Card,” “It’s the Law” and other programs that are part of the punishment for getting caught selling tobacco to minors in many states. Meanwhile, many retailers’ associations actually support mandatory age verification, because the so-called retraining programs and the associated laws cause so many inadvertent mistakes.

“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 benefited the city: being somewhat hands-off made it possible for immigrants from places where informal, off-the-books, underground economies were the norm to find their niche and replenish the city’s entrepreneurial spirit generation after generation.

Instead, though, we decide to stop selling cigarettes altogether, voluntarily surrendering a hundred dollars a day in earnings, or about one-third of our daily profits. Maybe it’s the small business person’s pigheadedness that motivates this decision, the feeling that “I’d rather put myself out of business than let someone else do it.” Or maybe it’s forward thinking. After all, if we get caught again, which seems inevitable, given the tenacity with which the city is stalking us and its penchant for ruthlessness, we’ll eventually lose the tobacco license anyway and have to make the same adjustment. This way we’ll at least get to keep the lottery machine! (What a statement—being desperate to hold on to a device that drives everyone crazy and earns only three dollars an hour.)

Either way, suddenly everything is jeopardized. The summer is over. For the last few months, I realize, I’ve been looking forward to each day rather than counting off the hours. Every morning, the first thing I did was check the logbook in the kitchen where the profits from the previous day are written down. Tomorrow was our friend—not that the numbers were
so
stupendous; it wasn’t like watching a portfolio of Google stock. It was just a sense that we as a family were doing our jobs and making good choices, and the future would turn out okay—all backed up by the apparent reality of numbers. Now it’s over. We’re headed back into survival mode, and I’m the reason we’re there.