Cornering the Market : Neighborhood Grocers Renovate, Cater to Ethnic Tastes to Survive Squeeze by Big Chains

At the intersection of Lorena Street and Brooklyn Avenue, on the border between East Los Angeles and Boyle Heights, stands a small, 80-year-old yellow brick building with a market inside. Cases of soft drinks are stacked in some of the old-fashioned wood produce bins, also painted yellow.

But since Jose and Sheri Anguiano bought the store last October, the building is getting a new look. On the roof a colorful new eight-foot-high handmade sign shows succulent fruits and vegetables and the words “El Rancho Produce Mkt.” A new wooden front porch got a fresh coat of white paint on a recent sunny Friday.

Shoppers were scarce, and food supplies depleted, when the Anguianos took over, Sheri Anguiano said. But in the past five months, sales have recovered, rising to $1,000 from $300 a day. Someday, they hope, sales will recover to the $2,000-a-day level enjoyed by the store’s owner in the 1960s and 1970s.

But the life of the neighborhood grocer in Los Angeles and throughout Southern California has grown more difficult since the 1960s, and many stores have disappeared entirely.

Only a decade ago there were 1,700 to 2,000 small stores in Southern California, according to William O. Christy, president of Certified Grocers of California, a Los Angeles-based cooperative wholesale grocery distributor. But today, the number seems to have leveled off at about 1,000.

The number “is kind of stabilizing,” Christy says. “It may be inching down over time. In the 1970s, it was dropping like a rock.”

Chains Encroaching

Small grocers face the problems of offering something that shoppers can’t get elsewhere for less, of buying and selling in small quantities, and of providing some of the exotic ethnic foods that customers are seeking in these small groceries.

No less a problem has been the arrival of big supermarket chains that have moved headlong into ethnic neighborhoods in the past few years with huge fresh produce sections, ethnic groceries of all kinds, and bilingual signs and videos to help shoppers.

In fact, facing El Rancho Produce Market across Brooklyn Avenue stands the 26-foot glass, steel and brick facade of a Lucky supermarket.

Walk inside both El Rancho and Lucky. The differences are apparent, in the the faces of the customers, in the size of the purchases. Because neighborhood grocery stores cater heavily to first-generation immigrants, they tend to draw older customers. The majority of customers at El Rancho have been shopping there since 1970, said manager Victor Gurrieta, who started working in the store that year and knows virtually all the customers by name.

“There are a lot of regular customers,” said Sheri Anguiano. “They come every day and they get soup, milk, one potato. My husband says his mother does the same thing. They like it fresh.”

That makes for ringing up a lot of small sales, so a small store’s customers had better be regular. Soon after she spoke, Alfonso Avila and his wife came up to the only cash register to buy a single gallon of milk and a large jicama for $2.42. A jicama is a turnip-shaped root typically eaten raw with lemon and chili, or cut up and served in salads. Avila said he had been shopping at the store for 15 years, adding that, “I live near here, and sometimes things are cheaper.”

Renovations and careful produce purchases have helped El Rancho compete with Lucky. But, she said, “If it wasn’t there, sure, we’d have more customers.”

Small grocery stores, whose entire floor space of 5,000 to 10,000 square feet could fit in the produce section of some of their larger competitors, also buy their wares in quantities that are dwarfed by the purchases of major chains. The result is a constant struggle for equal treatment from growers and food processors, together with greater attention to personal service, careful buying and a reliance on the most readily available, cheap, non-unionized labor force--the family.

Small stores have survived in part by catering to recent immigrants’ preference for familiar brand names. At El Rancho, most of the cans, mops and even the wood washboard for laundry bear the words “Made in Mexico,” “Hecho en Mexico,” or “Producto de Mexico.”

“When we first started, my husband bought a lot of American goods, but no one bought them,” said Sheri Anguiano. Now the store stocks goods with such brand names as Envasa, La Costena and Chocomel.

At Quang Hoa Super Market in Monterey Park, cans from Thailand, Malaysia, China and Taiwan fill the shelves, their unadorned, sometimes cryptic labels identifying contents in Chinese and in English. The English labels on several different stacks of cans from China all read simply, “Processed Vegetable.”

The fish section fills nearly a quarter of the 10,000-square-foot store, and sells fresh fish, squid, shrimp and giant clams. Large aquariums hold live catfish and crabs. Nathalie Senin, a Monterrey Park resident waiting at the Quang Hoa fish counter, said she went to huge supermarkets to buy American and French food, but that “I come to a Chinese store to buy Chinese food, mostly fish.”

Senin had come to buy a live catfish to prepare for dinner. Asked how she would kill the slowly finning, foot-long black fish, the young woman made a face and replied, “I’ll have them kill it for me, I don’t want to kill it myself.”

The fast-growing presence of large supermarket chains in Los Angeles’ many ethnic communities is pressuring small grocers to pursue all their survival tactics with renewed zeal this year. In the past 14 months, Vons has opened enormous Tianguis stores with bilingual signs in Montebello and El Monte, general manager Chris T. Linskey said. Three more are planned in Cudahy, Huntington Park and San Fernando, and some of the stores that Vons is acquiring from Safeway may be handed over to Tianguis. Other chains, such as Safeway, Ralphs and Lucky, have also taken steps recently to court Latinos.

Sales at Save-More Markets in East Los Angeles plummeted when Ralphs opened a Giant store just eight blocks away in September, 1986, co-owner Steve Soto said. “It went down 22% right away--the books don’t lie. Just terrible.” But sales have since recovered to within 6% of previous levels.

Community Tie

Recent openings of giant supermarkets in Los Angeles ethnic communities have battered sales at nearby small grocery stores, although few have been shoved over the brink of bankruptcy, Christy said. “None of them have wound up going out of business because of it. There’s still a community tie.”

Supermarkets draw carloads of customers from a wide area, he explained, and seldom dry up all the demand for groceries in the immediate vicinity. “A lot of people lose a little. . . . It doesn’t get the devastation like an atomic bomb within the first mile.”

But Soto, who is also president of the Mexican-American Grocers Assn., argued that a lot of grocers lose a lot. The Giant store in East Los Angeles and the new Tianguis in next-door Montebello together rack up about $1.1 million a week in sales, he estimated. “You’re talking a million dollars a week that they had to take away from somewhere. . . . It did hurt, and it hurt the smaller guys.”