A few short decades ago, Korean greengroceries were legion in New York City. Seeking opportunity in America, enterprising South Korean immigrants opened up small markets across the city, selling fruit, vegetables, candy, cigarettes and anything else they could fit on their shelves. Today, the Korean Produce Association reports that it has 2,500 members in the New York-New Jersey area, down from 3,000 a few decades ago – and Pyong Gap Min, a professor of sociology at Queens College, puts the number in the greater New York City area much lower, at fewer than 1,500.
What happened? There are two stories behind the Korean greengrocers’ disappearance. One involves a changing New York economy over the past 20 years. The other is a story of how stunningly well immigration can work in America – even over the course of a single generation.
Korean immigrants came to dominate New York’s greengrocer business more by chance than by design. Although Korean culture has not historically embraced entrepreneurs, small grocery stores made economic sense in New York. They required minimal capital to open, particularly for those brave enough to rent storefronts in areas that other merchants, spooked by the city’s skyrocketing violent crime in the 1970s and 1980s, were fleeing. The businesses generated cash fast: You can’t store a banana long, so people shopped often. The same factors had made groceries appealing to Jewish and Italian immigrants a generation earlier. Sometimes, in fact, Korean immigrants bought their businesses from retiring Jewish or Italian families.
This wasn’t a simple story of people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. Rather, communal self-help was the rule. Once a few Koreans opened stores, neighbors or church members would share news of available locations and talk other aspiring merchants through the process. Korean immigrants, coming from a country torn apart by its battle against communism, embraced the American Dream.
That dream, at times, seemed like it might end in a cold sweat. Starting in the early 1980s, longstanding mutual distrust between Koreans and blacks, coupled with campaigns that encouraged blacks to shop at black-owned businesses, culminated in a series of black boycotts. Notorious activist Sonny Carson sent demonstrators out with signs reading, “Don’t shop with people who don’t look like us.”
But the Korean community rallied, and the Korean Produce Association provided cash assistance, saving at least some of the stores. And the racial tensions that characterized the 1980s and early 1990s ebbed, in part because New York neighborhoods became more ethnically diverse, so that the “us” on Sonny Carson’s signs no longer made much sense. In 1980, 23.8% of Brooklyn residents were foreign-born; by 2006, that figure had risen to 37.8%.
But the greengrocers are unquestionably rarer now. Min has conducted several counts of Korean-owned businesses in historically black neighborhoods, and all of them show declines between 1991 and 2006.
New York’s economic evolution drove some of this change. The city once had few chain stores, but as the Giuliani-era crime turnaround made the city feel safe for shopping, pioneering national retailers moved in. Today, commercial properties are increasingly rented by chains: CVS, Starbucks, fast-food franchises and the national banks. Even Walmart is poised to come to town.
But there is another story behind the declining number of Korean grocers – one of economic success. For starters, South Korea itself has grown phenomenally since the early 1960s. As a result, fewer Korean immigrants come to New York. Immigration to the U.S. fell from a high of 35,849 in 1987 to 26,155 in 2008.
More fundamentally, there’s the Korean narrative in America. As Americans debate immigration policy yet again, Korean-Americans have shown exactly how the process ought to work. Duke professor Jacob Vigdor‘s 2008 report for the Manhattan Institute, “Measuring Immigrant Assimilation in the United States,” found Koreans economically indistinguishable from native-born Americans.
The children of Korean immigrants aren’t manning cash registers late at night; they’re in lines of work that pay more and that their parents see as higher-status: medicine, academia, civil service. Those who do go into business for themselves tend to start more glamorous or higher budget enterprises.
It’s a story of economic enterprise, evolution and, ultimately, assimilation, that can serve as a lesson to all who come to America today in search of a better life.
Vanderkam is the author of “168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think.” This essay was adapted from the winter 2011 issue of City Journal.
