Liquor Sellers Take Pledge to Change Ways

When civic leaders focus on crime here, they blame a lot of conditions: poverty, joblessness, a shortage of police. They also blame an oversupply of liquor stores.

This month, most of the city’s liquor store owners and mom-and-pop grocers agreed to try to alter some of their practices that have been deemed threatening to public health.

One hundred and eight stores have posted pledges promising to drop cheap high-alcohol wines from their shelves, remove drug paraphernalia and shut down at midnight, rather than the legally permissible closing time of 2 a.m.

With this pledge, store owners will no longer stock Gallo’s Thunderbird and Night Train and Constellation Brands’ Wild Irish Rose and Cisco -- “fortified” wines favored by poor customers in search of quick highs. Nor will they sell glass vases with fake flowers and scouring pads. Crack cocaine users convert the glass tubes into pipes and the pads into filters.

Yet, the merchants are not about to concede that their stores can be a nuisance, or worse. Instead, the mostly Yemeni store owners say, the concessions they are making are an acknowledgment that they need to build better relationships with their customers, as war dawns half a world away, said Mohamed Saleh Mohamed, president of the Yemeni American Grocers Assn.

They hope to make it clear to their mostly poor customers that most of their countrymen in Yemen are allies, not enemies, in the U.S. war with Iraq.

“We were always the victim of circumstance,” Mohamed said. “Anything that happens within three blocks of us, people blame on our stores.”

After the Oakland Raiders’ defeat in this year’s Super Bowl, rioters set fires and looted stores. And the liquor stores, Mohamed said, were blamed.

“We’ve hammered them,” Mayor Jerry Brown acknowledged in an interview.

“Dope dealers love to stand outside their markets and run in when the police go by,” Brown said. “We’ve given them a hard time.”

Sitting in the back office of one of four family-owned markets, surrounded by books on the law, accounting and writing, the 34-year-old Mohamed said, somewhat defensively:

“We’re in the business of making money. We’re not focusing on behavior.”

“Maybe the problems aren’t exactly tied to them,” said Oakland Councilman Larry Reid, who represents one of the most crime-ridden neighborhoods in the city.

“But the problems are taking place in and around their grocery stores,” Reid said.

The whole situation puts the Yemeni businessmen in an uncomfortable position.

“We are Muslim,” Mohamed said. “We’re not supposed to sell alcohol or advocate something that is totally against our religion. It hurts us. It hurts me to contradict my faith, but it’s the business we’re in.”

Some 30 years ago, many of them left Yemen, one of the poorest nations in the Middle East. When they arrived in Oakland, they did as their friends had done: They bought liquor stores.

The work has not been a picnic. They’ve learned to cope with robberies, shootings and killings.

During the 1980s, when crime was on the rise, Mohamed, his father and his brothers carried concealed weapons night and day. But, no longer. They and their mostly African American neighbors have grown accustomed to one another.

There are about 3,000 Yemenis in Oakland, and they dominate the corner-grocery market. In many neighborhoods, the supermarkets, banks and even the shoe repair shops fled years ago. All that remain are the Yemeni-owned markets, many of which provide bread and milk along with a steady supply of beer, wine and spirits.

They don’t sell homemade sweet baklava or other treats from their homeland; that’s not what their customers want. They offer what sells.

“We’re attracted to mom-and-pop stores,” Mohamed said. “A single job would not be enough to feed seven or 10 people in a family.”

His family’s markets supported six children, many of them now college educated with their own families to support through the markets.

Mohamed hopes that some day his family will no longer have to peddle alcohol.

“It’s a hard way to earn a living,” said fellow market owner Nasr Mohamed. He agreed to sign the pledge, but added: “We don’t know why they’re so critical of our stores.”

The environment became decidedly more hostile in 2001.

“We haven’t felt normal since Sept. 11,” Mohamed Saleh Mohamed said. Since then, he said, he and other Yemenis can’t go to the mall, the bank or a store without being stared at.

While Mohamed has convinced his association members to sign the pledge, he also has encouraged others to follow the example of his family’s store.

Two years ago, they cut down on their stock of alcohol, while adding bread, fresh vegetables, fried chicken, hot doughnuts and bright blue bubblegum ice cream -- which brings children into the store.

And they changed the name from Hi-Time Liquor Store to Millennium Market. Profits have jumped 40%.

Gladys Green, 79, a lifelong community leader, is hopeful. The intimidating atmosphere that engulfs liquor stores is, she said, “devastating.” And the pledge will be “a major part” of the solution.