Ethnic stores feel recession’s sting

By Dan Chapman

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The Turks and Bulgarians who frequent Bakkal International Foods in Atlanta buy one jar, not two, of the spicy Yugoslavian dill pickles.

Indians don’t order as many stiletto-heeled pumps from Chamblee’s Asna Baig.

Nancy Nguyen buys her Vietnamese family prime strips of pork from the Atlanta Farmers Market, but luxury goes only so far this holiday season.

“I’ll spend less this year — the economy is still iffy,” Nguyen, an engineer who works in Marietta, said last week. “I don’t know if it will continue this way or not.”

The recession, like a hurricane, was an equal-opportunity leveler, sparing no one. Asian, Hispanic, European, Middle Eastern and African shopkeepers across metro Atlanta cut costs, slashed prices and boosted advertising to hold on to newly tight-fisted customers.

Their customers, meanwhile, hunkered down too. At Plaza Fiesta, ground zero for Atlanta’s hard-hit Hispanic community, sales collectively dropped 40 percent to 60 percent last holiday season.

Yet what makes Atlanta’s ethnic retail community unique in the first place — prices and products geared toward an expatriate clientele — helped businesses weather the storm. And, after a year to forget, retailers look with promise to the holidays.

“I’m expecting better sales than last year,” said Julio Peñaranda, general manager of Plaza Fiesta. “People have come to a new reality. They’ll spend — not like they did two, three years ago — but hopefully much more than last year.”

Hispanics — the low-wage end of the economic totem pole — bore the brunt of the economic slide.

At Plaza Fiesta, a colorful warren of 280 tightly packed clothing, jewelry, photo and shoe shops along Buford Highway, 15 booths shut down earlier this year. A jeweler watched sales drop 15 percent. Owners of a car stereo shop that used to tally receipts of $3,000, maybe $4,000 on a good weekend, are now thankful to receive half that amount.

“That’s the first time we’ve had actual vacancies in the mall,” Peñaranda said. “The last Christmas season was probably one of the worst we’d ever seen. That was when the first brunt of job losses hit and the construction industry just stopped.”

Jeffrey Humphreys, director of economic forecasting at the University of Georgia, said the size of the Hispanic consumer market in the state zoomed to $15.1 billion in 2008, up from $1.3 billion in 1990. But that was before the recession hit the construction, horticultural, poultry and carpet industries that employed hundreds of thousands of Latinos.

“I do suspect that Hispanics, of the major racial and ethnic groups that I track, have been hit harder by this recession than any other group,” said Humphreys.

Hispanics, and the businesses they frequent, have also suffered in ways most other immigrant groups have not. Tougher local and federal tactics against illegal immigrants, for example, have chilled Hispanic economic activity.

Business, though, seems to have stabilized at Plaza Fiesta, Peñaranda said, which has a waiting list now for the mall’s booths.

In a recent poll, 65 percent of all U.S. shoppers told Consumer Reports they expect to cut back on holiday spending. The National Retail Federation predicts Americans will spend $437.6 billion this holiday season, down 1 percent from last year.

Asna Baig, an Indian-American who runs an online shoe, clothing and jewelry store, mirrors America’s post-recession spending habits. And while her mostly Indian customers aren’t buying as many shoes, they’re still purchasing saris and gold jewelry for year-end parties.

“Indian clothes are going to sell because of weddings,” said Baig while visiting the Global Mall in Gwinnett. “And Indian people might wear a sari once and never again.”

Andrew Kang, the manager of the Korean-owned Super H Mart grocery store in Duluth, tinkers with product, presentation and prices to beat the recession. Ramen noodles might just do the trick. A 20-pack of the pasta wholesales for $12.50, but Kang sells them for $9.99.

“This is like fishing,” he said. “We use it as a lure to draw people in.”

Seventy percent of Super H Mart’s customers are Asian, an ethnic group least-affected by the recession, according to UGA’s Humphreys. The Asian market in Georgia nears $9 billion, up from $1.1 billion in 1990.

“Job losses have been smaller among Asians mostly because they are heavily concentrated in the professional occupations that were not as deeply affected by the recession,” Humphreys said.

Kang said business slowed last year, but not terribly. He expects a one-third uptick in sales this holiday season.

Tahir Sariev doesn’t know what to expect. He and Ilkay Serbest opened Bakkal (“grocery store” in Turkish) two months ago on busy Roswell Road.

The trick, Sariev says, is to offer a little bit of something for everyone — Turkish, Russian, Greek, Croat, Armenian and American shoppers. Besides, year-end euphoria tends to open pocketbooks no matter where you’re from.

“Everybody celebrates the holidays, so business should be good,” Sariev said. “People may not buy new clothes. But they have to eat.”