Category Archives: Business

April 27, 2013

LOS ANGLES: A guy with a great idea, 99 Cent Store founder dies

Dave Gold, the founder of one of my favorite stores anywhere, has died of a heart attack at age 80, in the middle-class home he lived in for decades, despite his millionaire net worth.

His 99 Cents Stores, which he began right here in Los Angeles, spread to finally include some 300 outlets.

More than that, it opened a concept that immigrants have copied ever since: the __-Cents store — could be 98, 97, 1.29, whatever. They’re all over L.A.

All of it was made possible by globalization, particularly the entry of China into world manufacturing.

I love going to 99 Cents Stores. You can buy duct tape, radishes, cat food, Halloween candy, canned beans, and books that never sold by folks like Charles Osgood or some football player.

Every store has a million things that can be used for kids’ art projects. And you never have to ask anyone how much something costs, saving you time as well as money….

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February 3, 2013

LOS ANGELES: The Plaster Vendor, or how I spent my Sunday morning

TJ Plaster -- the Naked Woman

What’s nice about the Los Angeles of today is that you can go out a meet folks with worthwhile stories almost without trying.

I was in the area once called South Central L.A. (now South L.A.) and came upon a guy named Rogelio in a truck selling plaster statues to passers-by on Vermont Street: Snow White, bulldogs, snakes, Mickey Mouse, and this naked lady pictured here, among other things.

He buys them in Tijuana and brings them in.

I stopped to chat. He didn’t let me take his photo, but I shot other stuff.

He said sales of plaster was weak. “Enough to eat, but not well,” he said. “No meat.”

Rogelio is from Apatzingan, Michoacan. He was 16 in 1970 when he arrived in LA about 1 pm one day. He had a job by midnight.

Apatzingan is in Mexico’s Tierra Caliente, a particularly violent place, even before the latest nastiness. He went home a Plaster bulldog with furmonth ago to visit family. The police refer all problems to the local drug cartel — a pseudo-Catholic group of drug traffickers called the Knights Templar. Wonder how anyone would want to remain a cop under such conditions — or join the force at all.

At one corner, he said, there were two groups of headless bodies.

Still, he said he wants to return. This apparently has something to do with the fact that after 42 years in the country, he’s unable to find work that feeds anybody.

This, seems to me, is what LA is right now. If a Mexican immigrant has spent his time here learning new skills — English, welding, painting — he has a better chance of rolling with the economic bad times. But many people did not, assuming that the few skills they always had would be enough, as work had always been so plentiful that you could find a job in a few hours.

Those are the folks who are more likely to be leaving LA — some for other parts of the US, but mostly for Mexico, as it’s cheaper to be poor in Mexico, particularly if you have a place to live.

I told him about Craigslist as a place to put advertise his statues, and told him to give me a call if he needed help.

He said his daughter has a computer, but that maybe he’d call.

Hats

 

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January 16, 2013

LOS ANGELES: Dunkin Donuts coming to town…Cambodians unimpressed?

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A new doughnut chain will be coming to Los Angeles. Dunkin’ Donuts has announced that it will open stores in 2015 here in L.A. and around California.

The question is whether it will fare better than other chains who’ve had difficulty competing with the vast Cambodian-immigrant doughnut-shop network that dates to the late 1970s and early 1980s.

I told the story of how it is so many independent doughnut shops in Southern California are owned by Cambodians (well, Chinese-Cambodians really), from a country where doughnuts do not exist, in a tale about Ted Ngoy, the ill-fated Cambodian Doughtnut King, whose ambition led to his great rise and spectacular fall from grace.

Doughnut shops allowed those Cambodians who owned them to work their way into America — forcing them to speak English, deal with city halls and business licenses and landlords — in a way that other (mostly Khmer) Cambodians often did not.

Cambodian doughnut shops almost led to the downfall of Winchell’s. It’s also possible that Cambodians may be tiring of doughnut work, which requires owners to get up at 2-3 a.m. and where the profit margins are slim. Still, everywhere I go, independent doughnut shops remain owned by Cambodians.

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March 19, 2012

MIGRANTS: A Oaxacan baker and the “The Radicalism of the American Revolution”

Juan Gutierrez, Oaxacan baker in Santa Monica

I’ve been reading The Radicalism of the American Revolution by historian Gordon Wood lately. The book talks about the ways in which colonists were breaking from dependence on each other and from Britain, from traditions of England, from old religions to a new, individualistic Great Awakening and new ways of thinking, making a living and doing business.

This break from the Old World and creation of the New has always intrigued me.

Thus I was fascinated to listen to the story of Juan Gutierrez, a Zapotec Indian from a village in Oaxaca, and the owner of Panaderia Antequera in Santa Monica, which was the first Oaxacan-owned business in the LA area when it opened in 1985 or so.

We spoke in his bakery (17th and Ocean Park) the other day.

He and his wife began baking in their house, then found the small shop that was barely surviving and took it over. With the huge population of Oaxacan Indians on LA’s west side (the reasons for which are themselves fascinating, but which I’ll go into later), business has been great almost from the start, and this has encouraged other Oaxacan Indians to start their own.

Living and doing business here, far from the traditions and customs of his village, Gutierrez has had his own awakening, new ways of viewing what’s possible.

Running a business in Santa Monica, he was at the same time dealing with the 17th Century, in the form of demands by villagers back home that he return to do what’s known as his tequio or servicio. Indian villages in Mexico require members in good standing to perform a servicio, unpaid for three years.

This communal custom goes back hundreds of years and has been essential to the functioning of Indian villages. Those who don’t perform it can have their land, houses and property confiscated.

Now, though, many villagers live in the US, with responsibilities up here. Even if they have legal residency, it’s still expensive to go home; if they do not have papers, it’s even more so to return. Plus, they no longer are thinking like the young migrants they were when they arrived from the village as teenagers.

Mr. Gutierrez noted that the village depended on remittances from paisanos in the US, who had also donated money to the annual fiesta each year and funded improvements to city hall and the local school.

He offered to pay someone to do his servicio, saying he had a family and business up here and both needed his attention.

But the village authorities, in his view motivated by envy and believing him rich because he owned a business, insisted he come personally, to be a city councilman for three years.

So for three years he lived in the Old World and the New.

More later on what happened.

 

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March 6, 2012

MIGRANTS: Pizza Hut Tanda

I’ve just begun a story on the large number of Oaxacan business owners you find now in Los Angeles, particularly in Pico-Union, Hollywood and Koreatown.

I remember in the late 1990s coming to LA and not seeing any of this. But Oaxacans have lost a little of their fear of business. So now there are restaurants, markets, beauty salons, bakeries, a hardware store — all mentioning their Oaxaca connection and drawing on the vast Oaxacan population in those areas.

It’s an entire business community that started without anyone walking into a  bank for a loan.

I met Ramiro, who owns a butcher shop and market on Pico.

He told me years ago he worked at Pizza Hut, where all the Mexican employees formed a tanda — an informal savings/loan network, in which each member contributes money each month, then receives a large payout a year or two later. When it came his time to get the payout, he bought a house in Inglewood not because he wanted a house but really because he wanted a garage he could control. In the garage, he started a meat truck business.

That was 10 years ago. Now he’s got three butcher shops/markets.

 

 

 

 

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March 1, 2012

BUSINESS: El Payasito – `You get into what you have to get into to survive in this country’

In large parts of the LA economic ecosystem, immigrants alone participate.

The other day I happened on El Payasito, one of the great stores in LA. It sells all that anyone needs for a Mexican birthday party.

It’s owned by an Iranian immigrant named Sam, who wouldn’t give me his last name and didn’t want to be photographed.

He was a civil engineer in Iran and left after the Iranian Revolution. He owned an auto shop with a cousin for a while. Then saw that a much larger shop had burned on Pico Blvd, in Pico-Union, bought it and was renovating the place. He put a few things out for sale, and people snapped them up.

So instead of a auto shop, it became a kind of thrift store for a few years, selling remainders. Then a salesman for a party supply shop came by and begged him to let him open up two aisles of the store to his products. Sam did and they sold immediately. He opened more aisles, and sold out again.

He renamed the store El Payasito (Little Clown) and learned some Spanish and that’s how he’s spent the last 25 years: selling candy, cups, plates, toys, tortilla holders, candles, pots, pans and a lot more from his converted body shop on Pico. Dozens of pinatas — which he gets from Tijuana, and some from LA, and are the only thing in his store not from China, apparently — hang from his ceiling.

“The Latino market is just huge,” he told me. “When they make it they spend it.”

I’m fascinated by the immigrants who’ve made a living here selling Mexicans the most intimate parts of their culture: parties, food, clothes. I wrote a story years ago for the LA Times on just this. Had I known about El Payasito then, I would have included it.

Sam’s is worthy of a Chekhov short story. An immigrant engineer, fleeing political upheaval comes to a new land and ends up selling party supplies to Mexicans. Man, I love that story.

“You get into what you have to get into to survive in this country,” he said.

 

 

 

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February 27, 2012

STREETS: Adan, ice cream vendor

Adan, ice cream vendor, from Puebla, Mexico, Glassell Park, Los Angeles

Took this photo the other day when I was in Glassell Park, in northeast L.A.

I was asking Adan if he wasn’t afraid driving through Drew Street in Glassell Park, which had been a very frightening place, due to a gang that once controlled it. He said he’d been driving the street for three years with no problems.

I asked him if he’d mind if I took his photo. He crouched down and here it is.

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January 31, 2012

BUSINESS: Kelvin Anderson and World Famous VIP Records

Kelvin Anderson, owner of World Famous VIP Records in Long Beach

I’ve been spending time lately with Kelvin Anderson, owner of World Famous VIP Records in Long Beach, a ferociously independent record store.

Anderson’s store is a landmark, one of the places where rap began in Southern California, and a store that hung on long beyond others because it mastered the art of customer service, knowing what people wanted, and got them in touch with emerging artists who didn’t get any radio play.

But he’s downsizing now, moving from the space he occupied for 33 years and this will probably be his last year, the last independent record store around. “You can’t compete with free,” he told me.

Anderson was there at the beginning of one of the three great DIY musical forces to come out of LA. In Hollywood, it was punk in the late 1970s. In the late 1980s, from Paramount came Chalino Sanchez and Mexican drug ballads, narcocorridos.

Anderson helped mid-wife gangster rap, which emerged in the mid-1980s and into the 1990s, from the garages of Compton then Long Beach came West Coast gangster rap — first with NWA, then with Snoop Dogg and his 213 crew. 213′s first demo was recorded on a drum machine in VIP’s backroom.

Anderson’s advertisement was getting new cassettes in the hands of those with big car stereos and ghetto blasters — “street promotion.”  (Gangster rap was so punk rock.)

Yet I wonder whether these kinds of geographic movements of intense garage band creativity are as possible nowadays, even as technology has allowed everyone to be a DIYer, all from a laptop computer, and avoid entirely the control of major record labels.  “It’s people’s attention span,” Anderson told me.

Hope to have a podcast of an interview with him (a first for me!) that’ll go with the story on VIP’s downsizing, which I hope will run in a few days.

 

 

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