Scooping Up Big Profits From Protesters

Mai Phan could have used more than 31 flavors this week.

While other businesses near the Little Saigon protest site have lost half of their customers or more, Phan’s Baskin-Robbins franchise is flourishing. For now, his business is no ordinary ice-cream cone, it’s a double banana split with extra whipped cream.

Phan serves 200 to 225 customers in an average day. But Monday, when 10,000 people jammed the shopping center across Bolsa Avenue to protest shopkeeper Truong Van Tran’s Ho Chi Minh portrait and Vietnamese flag, he served at least 1,200.

He ran out of strawberry and vanilla, and it wasn’t even summer.

Phan figured he was in for a good day Monday, because Saturday--another big protest day--he beat records he regularly sets on Father’s Day and Mother’s Day. So he called in an extra four people to work that night, along with the two regularly scheduled.

But he still wasn’t ready for what happened.

As the invective spewed hotter across the street, customers crowded into the ice-cream store and lined up out the door, onto the sidewalk and into the parking lot.

“I never saw myself or my staff work as hard as we did yesterday,” he said Tuesday, while scrolling through the previous day’s cash-register tape. In the background a Vietnamese-language radio station broadcast reports on the continuing protest across the street.

Customers packed his store throughout the night Monday. Protesters get hungry too.

Phan’s store usually closes at 10 p.m. He finally shut the door at 11:33 p.m. and started to clean up.

Then there was a knock.

“Why did you guys close early?” an ice cream lover--or someone who was desperately hungry-- wanted to know. “There are still a lot of people who want ice cream.”

Phan told him to wait 15 minutes while they cleaned up. By the time he opened back up, another 15 people were waiting in line.

“They just kept coming,” Phan said, a smile on his face.

He closed the doors for good at 12:30 a.m. “After that, we still had people coming, but I say it’s too late for an ice cream store,” Phan said.

Exhausted, he didn’t make it out of bed in time to open the store for the usual 10 a.m. start Tuesday.

While Phan is raking in the bread for dishing out the ice cream, he wants the protests to end soon.

“I want to see my people back to normal, to take care of their families and their normal life,” he said.