My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store by Ben Ryder Howe

Author:Ben Ryder Howe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Autobiography
ISBN: 9780385664127
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2009-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

A WEEK OR so after the sauce delivery, Mother Nature decides that having inflicted one of her coldest winters ever on the East Coast, she needs to throw in a historic blizzard as well, so tonight I am at the store listening to radio forecasts of thirty-plus inches of snow, hurricane-strength winds and potentially an economic disaster for the city’s merchants. Even before the storm arrives the mayor cancels school the next day and calls out the National Guard. Residents are told to stay home at all costs, and judging by the sudden surge in customers wanting candles and bottled water, they’re planning to obey.

“Do you think you’ll open tomorrow?” more than one customer asks.

“If the roads are blocked, we can’t,” I reply, surprised at how anxious supposedly tough New Yorkers can get about weather. Spending the day locked up or out in the snow sounds like fun to me. But this storm promises to be different, if for no other reason than that I’ve never been the owner of a deli during a “cataclysmic weather event.” And there is another thing that gives me pause: the older people of the neighborhood who can barely get out of their apartments on a normal day and won’t be able to move around at all if the sidewalks are buried. Based on how much food they buy, I would guess that some of them have only enough in their cupboards to last a few days.

If not for the roads (and the bridges, which will definitely be closed tomorrow if the forecast holds, cutting off Staten Island from the rest of the city) I would find a way to make it to the store—for the neighborhood, but also for us, because I know now that Kay was right about the hazards of closing for even one day. When you close, bad things happen. You may not lose all your customers, but you might miss an important delivery, or your food might spoil, or the cat might get angry about not getting fed and pee all over the store. Plus, if you survive taking off a single day, you might be tempted to take off two in a row.

“No way,” says Kay when I tell her I’m willing to drive in. “Forget about it. No matter how much we need money, it not worth dying for.” Which is a pretty good indicator of how scary this storm is, that even my mother-in-law is counseling restraint.

There’s been a lot of sober reflection around here lately. No one has a formula for determining when to call it quits, but if they did I imagine it would be something like: you’ve made less money than you’ve spent for way too long (check); even if you were making money, you’d be so deeply in debt that it wouldn’t matter (check); not only is your business failing, but your house, which wasn’t threatened before you took on the business and which you vowed to protect under any circumstances, is

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