Surely there has to be some reason that many convenience stores are owned/operated by people from the Mid East. This is based on my personal observations and not stereotypes, which I am not promoting.
Anyone know of a factual explaination for this phenomenon?
Beyond making sales two of the most critical operational aspects of running a service business successfully are controlling the cost of labor and controlling employee theft. Middle eastern and asian owners tend to hire immediate and extended family members and pay them relatively little in exchange for providing an entre into the US and the grateful relatives usually (not always) work hard and tend not to steal from their family members.
Why always convenience stores?
I’m going to WAG here. I suspect it’s because Quick-E-Marts tend to be pretty easy to start and don’t require as much capital as something bigger like a restaurant. You just need a small building, gas pumps, some general merchandise, and a few people to run it. If you, the owner, work there for say 10-12 hours a day, you may only need 2-3 people to run it in addition to you and, if you have the family, you probably don’t have to pay em much. And Quick-E-Marts are about as failsafe a business as you can get, if I had to bet.
I guess you have not visited many motels?
Well, ‘convenience stores’ are one of the cheapest & easiest businesses for an immigrant (or anyone else) to get into.
Cheap because:
Easy because:
In urban areas, these stores are often located in buildings with living quarters upstairs. So your whole family lives upstairs, and take turns working in the business. Housing, a job, no transportation expenses, all in one.
Compare this to operating a McDonalds, Burger King, OfficeMax, CUB Foods, etc. They take a couple million $ to get a franchise, purchase the equipment needed, and buy the supplies, pay for your share of their advertising budget, etc. Then there are months of training required at the headquarters of the franchiser, all with no income for this time.
Also, for those whose mind runs that way, there are lots of opportunites for non-legal sidelines to make more money, tax-free:
I rather suspect you’re confusing Indians / Indian sub-Continentals with Middle Easterners.
That being said, “small commerce” roughly analagous to small convience marts is the dominant form of private sector commerce in both regions, making the business model relatively familiar.
Okay, maybe donut shops too.
http://www.asianweek.com/2000_06_22/biz1_cambodiandonutbiz.html
Not about Middle Easterns, but Cecil speaks on How can Korean-Americans afford to start so many grocery stores?
Evidently it’s a community effort for Korean-Americans, and I suspect there may be something similar for other ethnic groups.
Are there any convenience stores run by Middle Easterners? There’s a lot run by Pakistanis, Indians, and other Indian subcontinental emigrants. There’s also a lot of Koreans running them. Are there any Middle Easterners at all?
I believe in India being a shopkeeper of any kind confers a certain amount of status. So Indians might find the jobs alluring in ways we native Americans wouldn’t.
Wendell, I think it depends on the area. Here in Michigan where we have the largest concentration of Middle Easterners outside of the Middle East, they do tend to own a lot of the convenience stores.
I once heard a report on Public radio about the incidence of Pakistanis owning hotels. There were several factors are work. One was that being a hotelier was actually a traditional thing in some families; they said a lot of Pakistani motel owners in the U.S. come from the same region of Pakistan and have one of three last names. But they also said that it makes for a good business because (as someone noted for convenience stores) the businessowner him- or herself can do a lot of the work by putting in long hours and hiring family.
This report also said something about the work ethic. It’s bad to generalize and this may have been a little insulting, but I think there is something to the idea that many Americans don’t want to work as hard. I think this is not laziness so much as our attitude about success. To a lot of people, being successful means having earned some leisure time. Owning a business is equated with a level of prestige & wealth, one that shouldn’t obligate you to be on site working 14 hours a day. I dunno, it kinda made sense at the time; of course they said it a lot better than I am.
I think that also applies to convenience stores.
Now that I think about it, all of the convenience stores around here that I frequent are owned by Middle Easterners. I get to know the owners because they are so often in the store.
In the Buffalo area, most of the independent c-stores and bodegas are owned by immigrants from Yemen.
CrankyAsAnOldMan, Pakistan isn’t in the Middle East - it’s in South Asia. Middle East would be Israel, part of Turkey, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and the Arabian peninsula.
They guy that runs the place near my house is Iraqi, he now claims to be Pakistani to anyone that asks for obvious reasons.
Thanks for the insight.
Someone please correct my WAG if it is way off base, but I have always assumed some kind of government subsidy for immigrants was responsible for the proliferation of 7-11 and Dunkin’ Doughnuts run by new Americans and foreigners.
The definition actually varies a bit. Iraq is always included as well. Other areas, sometimes. For example this map includes Iran, Cyprus and the Caucasus:
http://www.sitesatlas.com/Maps/Maps/MEast.htm
But this map excludes the Caucasus:
http://www.yourchildlearns.com/middle_east_map.htm
These two are extra-inclusive and include several Central Asian states and extends all the way to the Indian border, including Pakistan:
http://www.geographyiq.com/meast.htm
As this map notes, a lot of people include Egypt in the Middle East as well:
Me? I go east far enough to include Iran and include the Caucasus and, when I’mn feeling like it, Egypt. I don’t include any of old Soviet Central Asia. I have my reasons for this scheme, but it is plenty arbitrary :).
I’m aware of that; sorry if I confused anyone else.
I brought up Pakistani hotel owners only because someone else mentioned South Asians as frequent owners of some types of businesses, and because it was an example of an immigrants-owning-businesses trend which I had heard discussed in a scholarly way (rather than just conjecture). I thought it was as fitting to address that, as it was to relate my Chaldean neighbors owning the Party Store around the block.
You should have been a fly on the wall when we were trying to revise a reporting of how many of our international students hail from whichwhere. We don’t usually do those reports from our office, and had to work from a list someone else had done that gave wishy-washy region names without countries designated. We had some mild disagreement about how to classify certain countries in Africa, but nearly came to blows over Turkey. Heh.
Don’t forget that the middle east is the birthplace of merchant-ing.
I was curious about a local little grocery owner’s country of origin while browsing the internet… entered his name and hit on a page from a school, the name sounds like it teaches how to run businesses such as grocery stores… anyhoo, the page listed names of all graduates that year, plus their country of origin.
Many were from Egypt and Lebanon, my search name wasn’t on the list, but it turns out he’s from Lebanon… where the average yearly income is around $4,000 US (don’t quote me on that).
I do believe the theory that foreigners are generally more trustworthy and dependable when it comes to working 365 days a year, then there’s the added element of providing a service for the community that this guy genuinely enjoys about his job.