For Ken Concepcion, books are his business – cookbooks to be exact.
"We wanted to open up a cookbook store which hasn’t been in LA previously since 2009," Concepcion said.
What You Need To Know
- A survey from UCLA found Asian American small businesses are having a tougher time recovering from the worst of the pandemic
- A lack of information about government aid in Asian languages was a common barrier, especially for first-generation business owners. Many of them also don't have a website and rely on tourism
- Younger business owners seemed to have an easier time transitioning to online sales
- Besides the pandemic, many retail stores are also facing shortages and supply chain issues as a result of delays at the port
During the lockdown, he said a lot of people who did not cook learned to cook at home.
"Before the pandemic, we only had a little bit of our inventory online and we now have pretty much 90% of it is online right now," Concepcion said.
He launched Now Serving four years ago and just reopened his brick and mortar store a couple weeks ago. He thinks 2021 has been just as challenging as 2020 due to high expectations.
"I think everybody just kind of assumed everything was going to go back to normal and they wanted everything to happen like it did in the before times, as I call it," Concepcion said.
He is seeing visitors slowly return to Chinatown, especially on the weekends, but the bigger concern has been supply chain issues and delays at the port heading into the holidays.
"We have to kind of gamble on titles that we think will sell so we have to order them in high volume," Concepcion said. "You have to make sure you have enough for Christmas, but you actually don’t know if it will sell or not."
Over at Paper Please, "There was one huge order that I had ordered in May and I didn’t get it until end of August," said Owner Friedia Niimura.
She is seeing similar issues with her stationary, including a demand for journals as people want to chronicle their pandemic experience.
"A lot of our vendors this year say that we might not be able to reorder, so if we do sell out then we’ll be out until we don’t know when next year," Niimura said.
Still, some of these newer stores owned by younger, English speaking generations are faring better than small souvenir and tourist shops that have been staples in Chinatown for decades. Plenty of those businesses remain closed or no longer keep regular hours. Between inconsistent demand and product delays, parts of Chinatown continue to look more like a ghost town.
"It’s definitely very much in flux and unstable," Concepcion said.
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