Joo Han, the son of Korean immigrants, runs a Manhattan produce store that looks much as it did when his parents opened it a generation ago, working endless hours to forge a new life, banana by banana, milk carton by milk carton.
But the shop that paved his parents’ path to the middle class can barely cover the rent today. Mr. Han is thinking of closing or selling the business - a step that two nearby Korean grocers are also considering, and that hundreds of others have already taken.
For decades, Korean greengrocers have embodied a classic New York type - the immigrant entrepreneur - and become as much a staple of city life as the yellow taxi and the pretzel vendor.
Now, they are on the wane.
“If you come back next year,” Mr. Han said halfway through a 12-hour shift at his store on Broadway in the northern part of Manhattan, “I might not be here.”
Koreans still dominate the small-grocery business in New York; the Korean Produce Association estimates that they own 70 percent of the city’s stores. But their ranks are thinning as they face the same forces that threaten all sorts of small family businesses: rising rents, increased competition from online and corporate rivals, and more scrutiny from city agencies that impose fines.
The stores are also succumbing to the same impulse that prompted couples to open them in the first place: the desire to see their children do much, much better.
Despite his pride in his family’s enterprise, Mr. Han, 42, is adamant that his two teenage sons not take up the business. “When they get bad grades, my wife says, ‘You want to work in a fruit store all your life?’ ” he said.
There were some 2,500 Korean groceries in 1995, said Pyong Gap Min, a Queens College sociologist who has studied the industry. By 2005, that number had fallen to about 2,000, he said, and it has continued to slide. Businesses like nail salons and dry cleaners have become more attractive than retail to Korean entrepreneurs, Professor Min said. “Small stores cannot survive,” he said. “It’s over.”
The Korean-American Grocers Association of New York has about half as many active members as it had a decade ago, and its president, Chong Sik Lee, says corner stores will eventually have to expand into supermarkets or close.
Instead of taking over the businesses when their parents retire, as some Italian- and Jewish- Americans did generations ago, the children of Koreans are finding work far from the produce section, in law firms, banks and hospitals. And parents insist on that, Mr. Lee said.
“They want their children to have a higher position,” said Mr. Lee, who abandoned his dreams of studying philosophy to run a grocery, and now owns a supermarket in the borough of Queens.
Immigrants from South Asia, Latin America and especially the Middle East are moving into the grocery trade, but no new group predominates, Mr. Lee said.
Mr. Han, who took over his store on the Upper West Side of Manhattan after his mother fell ill, is not proud to be among the secondgeneration Korean grocers. “
If I had to do it all over again, I would have sold the business 10 years ago,” Mr. Han said.
He is already nostalgic. When he thinks of his parents, he pictures them behind the counter. “This store did a lot for us,” he said. “It gave us everything we wanted, everything we could hope for.”
“But,” he added, “maybe it’s time for me to move on.”
By SAM DOLNICK
