Costs in the Jewelry Business Include Fear

A customer walked into Raja Parson’s Tustin jewelry shop Thursday and asked if he’d heard about the shooting that morning in Lake Forest. Parson, a 55-year-old shop owner who got into the business 20 years ago, had not.

The husband-wife owners of the Lake Forest shop had been shot, the customer said. The woman died, the husband was critically wounded. The assailants escaped.

The customer completed his business and then, as he was leaving, told Parson: “You guys be very careful.”

That is not an idle comment in the jewelry shop business. Like doughnut shops and nail-care salons, jewelry stores have proliferated in Orange County in the last 10 years or so, many of them of the mom-and-pop variety and many owned by immigrants, such as the shop that Parson and his wife, Dorit, own in a strip mall along Newport Avenue.

But the jewelry business is not like a doughnut shop or beauty salon.

Steel gates adorn the windows at Parson’s store. To get in, you press a buzzer. Parson eyeballs you from a desk 30 feet away, screening you for admittance. If he doesn’t know you or if something looks suspicious, such as someone wearing a heavy coat during a heat wave, you probably won’t get in. As it is, Dorit thinks her husband is too cavalier about who he lets in; he shrugs and says that the nature of business is to attract customers, not turn them away.

Then, they hear about the Lake Forest shooting and, unlike most other entrepreneurs, they don’t consider it a fluke, as something that could never happen to them.

“It’s a little different here than anywhere else in the world,” Parson says Friday morning in his office. “Like in India, for

example. You could stand on a street corner and sell diamonds, right in the open. You literally could stand there, people open big parcels of diamonds, show it to somebody, and make a deal. That would never happen here. Unheard of. You would be robbed.”

Parson grew up in India, then worked in Denmark, his wife’s native country. In 1978, while visiting his brother in Orange County, he fell in love with the place. Trained in electronics, Parson switched to the gem business that had been his father’s trade. He took classes and began his career as a salesman where the owner kept the frontdoor open. Within a few years, he and Dorit eventually put their own money into a shop.

It’s a story, he says, that replicates that of countless immigrants both here and in Los Angeles, where the old-guard jewelers gradually have given way to immigrants who brought their wares from places like Armenia and Hong Kong and the Middle East. Now, he jokes, “I think there are more jewelers than people.”

Parson’s shop has always had security features, like the buzzer and gated windows. Still, he is not a fearful man and does not come to work each morning worrying about being robbed. Nor, however, does he pretend that it couldn’t happen to him.

“Sometimes, I can’t believe why I’m not more scared than I am,” he says. “To do full security, it is very expensive. Like somebody suggested, install metal detectors. Those things are not cheap. And if you have one, then what do you do?”

Shootings like that in Lake Forest, however, give him pause. You start thinking, he says, about doing something else for a living. But, at 55, he knows it’s a bit late in the game to shift gears. And, because he isn’t fearful by nature, he enjoys coming to work in the morning.

Early on, starting his own business meant long hours and short assets. He and Dorit banked their future on the jewelry business and are doing reasonably well with the shop.

With that in mind, I ask if he’d resist a robbery attempt. “You know what,” he says, “it could happen to anybody. Whatever we have is here, and that’ll go for most of the independent mom-and-pop jewelers. If someone is walking out with it, I think you would try to stop him. I think so. I don’t know how I’d react. Now, right now, I think I’d say, ‘No, let them take it.’ But at that time, you’d say, ‘My God, all my life is walking out with them.’ ”

The Lake Forest shooting may lead him to focus more on customers he already knows, or those referred by others. Strangers may have a harder time making it through the frontdoor, “as long as I remember,” he says.

Dorit says they’ll be cautious, but not paranoid. “The shooting will have a sobering effect for a couple days, then life goes on,” she says. “We probably won’t be talking about this in a few days.”

Raja agrees and recalls the days in the late 1970s and early ‘80s when everyone was optimistic about opening a business. “At that time,” he says, “it never even crossed my mind I could be held up or anything could happen.”

With an eye, however, to last week’s shooting, he adds: “But you get a wake-up call every now and then.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821, by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail at dana.parsons@latimes.com.