Shops Under Siege

People like Paul Singh, Gladys Cuellar and Kenneth Lee fight a losing battle, up to 18 hours a day.

They run neighborhood convenience stores in stretches of the city where “neighborhood” is a dying concept, when superstores offer discounts no independent business can match.

Even on good days, when they scrape together enough revenue to cover their rents and steep insurance, they watch their meager earnings get nibbled away by shoplifters. Often they can’t give chase: They’re the only people in the store.

Hundreds of shopkeepers across Los Angeles, many of them recent immigrants, are watching their hard-earned investments turn into the American nightmare: a dead-end job.

These days the most notorious member of this merchant class is Korea Jo Wong Kim, who police say shot 17-year-old Brenda Hughes to death as she sat in the back seat of a car outside his Highland Park market. Kim--charged with murder Monday--apparently thought that the girl’s friends had shoplifted in his store before they rejoined her in the car, and followed them out of the store with his handgun, police said. Kim’s wife suggested that her husband, who averaged $20 a day in profits and was trying to sell the store, “just snapped.”

In nearly two dozen stores throughout Los Angeles, no shopkeeper offered an excuse for Kim’s alleged actions. But many said they understood the grueling pressures he faced.

“Troublemakers can drive you crazy in this business,” said Lee, who has run a grocery store in the Westlake district for 10 years. “This is a penny business. Our earnings come in pennies and nickels. That’s why every bottle of Coke or beer we sell matters.”

Adds George Washington, a 52-year-old South-Central Los Angeles man who started his convenience store last year: “It’s extremely tougher than I thought.”

The economic stakes, the fear of robberies, and the mutual suspicion between some merchants and their customers can create a vicious cycle. The suspicion builds, sometimes unknowingly. Teenagers, especially minorities, are as likely to complain about shopkeepers’ rudeness as shopkeepers are to decry teenage shoplifters.

Convenience stores, often nestled in desolate stretches of Los Angeles’ toughest neighborhoods, are “obsolete,” said Linda Griego, president of Rebuild LA, the urban rebuilding agency created after the 1992 riots. They simply don’t tempt modern shoppers, who now seek one-stop shopping destinations such as malls, superstores or shopping districts where consumers can buy groceries, rent a video and pick up dry-cleaning all at once.

Still, Griego, who once ran a small Mexican deli, acknowledges the deep hunger many feel to run their own businesses--a hunger that leads some to invest deeply without a knowledge of retail marketing or a source of employees outside family members.

Though some analysts see a bright future in independent markets specializing in ethnic foods or grocers pooling their buying power into co-ops, they don’t see much hope for the general convenience store.

The number of small markets nationwide has grown in the past 10 years, yet the money earned by the stores has been decreasing annually since 1985, according to statistics from trade publications Progressive Grocers Marketscope and Marketing Guide.

Cuellar feels that crunch.

Outside her tiny market on a desolate stretch of Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park is a “for sale” sign, right next to the ones advertising beer and wine. Inside there is barely room for two people to stand shoulder to shoulder between the coolers filled with Budweiser and Coca-Cola and the shelves loaded with pork rinds and canned enchilada sauce.

Cuellar, a West Hollywood resident, bought the place six months ago.

“Why? Good question,” she said with a smile.

She simply wanted to be her own boss. She quit her job as a cashier in a shoe store, signed a lease for the $550 rent on the space and started stocking up.

At first she had trouble with kids shoplifting, but they stopped once they got to know her. Still, few customers came inside. Those that did griped about her prices, saying they were far higher than local supermarkets.

“Those big markets, they buy by the thousands. You buy a thing at 49 cents, how are you going to sell it for 29 cents? Better have a big business or nothing,” said Cuellar. She works 11 hours a day and keeps her sons, ages 10 and 8, in a tiny room behind the store when they’re not in school, watching TV.

Parvinder Singh is not giving up yet, but he expects to in the next few years.

He and his brother run a liquor store and market in an East Hollywood strip mall they share with a video store and a dry cleaner. The neighboring businesses draw enough customers into the Singhs’ store for them to make a small profit, but incidents such as one recent theft wear Singh down.

Two boys, who couldn’t have been more than 6, stood below Singh’s counter that day and confessed that they were 15 cents short for a cookie. As Singh agreed to give them a discount, they secretively stuffed their pockets with candy bars and gum. He caught them with $2 worth of candy.

“You have to sell $20, $25 worth of stuff to make up those $2,” Singh said. “We have to keep our eyes open all the time.”

Singh said he shoplifted as a child in India, but he is losing patience with thieves. Some days they can wipe out his entire profit.

“This business is like our child,” said Singh, a mild-mannered man who warmly greets his many good customers. “When they try to steal, they really make us mad.”

The complaint echoes everywhere. The owner of a West Los Angeles mini-mart just outside Beverly Hills says thieves have cost him up to $3,000 a month. A merchant in the Hyde Park district of South Los Angeles says kids seem more brazen than when she last ran a market, in the 1980s.

Some teenagers, resenting the shopkeepers’ suspicion, say they avoid certain shops--sometimes the ones that most need their business.

Tiffany Lewis, 15, was among a group of girls on Crenshaw Boulevard Sunday who said they are tailed by merchants whenever they enter shops, ranging from small local markets to big stores at the Beverly Center. They believe it’s because they’re black. “It’s horrible. It’s insulting,” Tiffany said.

But other teenagers say they understand why they’re watched. Anthony, a 14-year-old Santa Monica private school student, boasted of ripping off beepers and Walkmans from Westside merchants.

Does he worry about depriving merchants of their small profits? “I’m the sort of guy,” he says, “who doesn’t give a f---.”

Paul Singh worries that many of the people who enter his stores think like Anthony. Paul Singh--who comes from the same region of India as Parvinder Singh and so has the same last name--owns five small stores with a group of brothers and cousins. He says shoplifters make off with much of his profits.

He works 16 hours a day, seven days a week. When he’s lucky, he says, he makes $12,000 a year. To support his wife and three children, who live with him in a Hollywood apartment, Singh borrows from friends and relatives.

“It’s too much work, man,” said the 59-year-old Singh from behind bulletproof glass at his shop west of USC. “No vacation, no entertainment. We have to pay for everything. Bills, bills, bills--I can’t even sleep at night.”

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Why would anyone invest their lives in a tiny store?

Talk to Arturo Rodriguez.

Nine years ago, Rodriguez came to Los Angeles from Mexico and opened a small market in the central city. Last month he used the profits from that store to open a larger produce market in Culver City, across the street from Sony Studios and a few blocks from a Smart & Final, which Rodriguez says has higher prices than his shop.

How does he keep prices down?

“Smart & Final has to pay its employees a lot of money. Here it’s my daughters, my nephew, my wife,” he said in Spanish, smiling as he stacked a box full of potatoes for a customer who was chatting on a cell phone.

“I’ve worked hard since I was a boy,” said Rodriguez, who added that he spends 18 hours a day, seven days a week working at his markets. With his new enterprise, he says, “I can give my children a better education. They will know how to work and will be able to take care of themselves.”

Times staff writer K. Connie Kang contributed to this story.