Some Immigrants Doing Well Even Though Ranks of Independents Thinning

When Vons opened its vast Tianguis store 14 months ago in Montebello with heavy Latino-oriented advertising and plentiful supplies of fresh produce and ethnic foods, some experts predicted disaster for nearby small, neighborhood grocery stores.

Seven blocks west on Whittier Boulevard stands Farmer’s Ranch Market, a one-story stucco building. The entire store is just 6,000 square feet, with produce filling more than half the space and a delicatessen and four cash registers filling most of the rest. Long, unshielded fluorescent light bulbs bathe the food in a bright but harsh glare. Owner George Attar says he has never advertised, and the only sign outside the building is a placard on the roof with the store’s name on it.

Popular wisdom says that Attar should be hurting. Yet, on a recent Friday, nearly the same number of cash registers were manned in both stores: five of 15 at Tianguis; all four at Farmer’s. Business is up at least 10% since the Tianguis opened, Attar stated. “I think it’s improved my business. They draw people into the area.”

Few grocers are as optimistic as Attar about the impact of a supermarket opening down the street. Yet Attar, the son of an Armenian produce dealer in Beirut, is typical of Los Angeles’ growing number of aggressive recent immigrant shopkeepers. The presence of Middle Eastern and Korean immigrants in the Southern California small grocery business has expanded recently despite contraction of the overall market for such independent operators.

Attar has his own vegetable fields near Bakersfield and Delano. To buy what he cannot grow, he rises at about 1:30 a.m. and heads for the produce market at Central Avenue and Olympic Boulevard in downtown Los Angeles. His store employs just 12 people, including Attar’s wife, two brothers and two sisters.

Five major supermarkets operate within a mile of Farmer’s Ranch without affecting sales, Attar said. “Whatever they do, nothing can affect me. . . . Those guys, they have buyers who don’t know what they are doing.”