USA TODAY International Edition
Small business owners sweep up broken dreams
Pandemic, unrest raised expenses and cut profits
Joel Stallworth is smiling in front of his tiny boarded up shop in downtown Los Angeles. He’s wearing a black Tshirt he designed not long after looters swarmed through the smashed door and carried out armloads of clothing and accessories. Around a photograph of The Small Shop LA in tatters, red lettering says: “We love y’all. Thanks for the energy.” And that’s his message for every single person who walked out with his merchandise on May 29: “That is not a stolen good. That is a fight for freedom.” “You can have it and wear it with pride. You can take a picture and post it on Instagram,” Stallworth says. “Stick your head up. You are amazing. These protests are the only reason we got these police officers arrested.” Five years ago, he opened his 300square- foot storefront on a historic stretch of downtown Los Angeles carrying streetwear, including his own brand, Lost in LA. One of the most popular T- shirts: “Love Is Energy.” Watching over him on the wall of his shop is a picture of his grandfather Bishop Lewis Dolphin Stallworth Sr., a police chaplain whose name graces a charter school in Stockton. The picture says: “Go With God.” The night his store was looted, Stallworth’s phone rang nonstop. This is what he told his worried friends. “Let them do whatever they have to do. Right now I want to focus on lives. Lives over shops. I understand the hurt. Sometimes we gotta go to war for it to be a better day. If they have to burn down my shop to save an unarmed human from being slaughtered in the streets, if this is what it takes, if one person can get saved, then my shop
has done its work.”
From coast to coast, small businesses reel
Behind all the broken glass are broken dreams. From a Chinese restaurant in Seattle to a New Jersey liquor store, small businesses have been ravaged by looting following the death of George Floyd in police custody, dealing a second crippling blow to those already reeling from COVID- 19.
Years of hard work and life savings were wiped out overnight, putting reopening plans on hold and forcing small businesses to seek relief from insurers or their communities.
The losses have been particularly devastating to minority- owned businesses, which typically don’t have as much cash on hand and aren’t insured against damage during protests.
These businesses were already being disproportionately harmed by the pandemic, says Robert Fairlie, an economics professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The coronavirus has hit African Americans harder than other groups, with higher mortality rates and greater job losses, a harrowing setback that many fear will deepen existing inequities.
Fairlie’s recent study for the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research shows the number of active business owners in the United States plunged by 3.3 million or 22% from February to April when the coronavirus shut down the economy, the steepest decline on record.
African American businesses fell the most – 41% – followed by Latino business owners 32% and Asian business owners 26%. Damage from looting, Fairlie said, “is going to make things even worse.”
Snapshots of small businesses across America reveal a range of complicated emotions and reactions.
Business owners told USA TODAY they share protesters’ pain over Floyd, who was laid to rest last week in Houston, and many of them have taken to the streets to make their own voices heard. They support uprisings across the country that are leading to a much needed and long- deferred national reckoning with police brutality and racial injustice. And they point out that the looting was often not the work of protesters, but outside agitators and opportunists. But, as they sweep up shattered pieces of their lives, some say they’ve become needless victims of misplaced anger and senseless destruction.
‘ It saddens me that I can’t even be sad about my shop’
What it means to be Black in America is something Stallworth knows all too intimately.
He was raised in Stockton, California, a city east of San Francisco hard- hit by the 2008 housing crisis that is one of the nation’s most diverse yet suffers from chronic economic and health disparities and racial tensions. Stallworth, one of 10 children, graduated from California State University Stanislaus. A twosport athlete, he qualified for the Olympic trials in 2008 and last year was inducted into the California Collegiate Athletic Association Hall of Fame.
He didn’t study fashion, but on his own began making the kind of clothing and hats he longed to wear. People stopped him so many times on the street, his wife persuaded Stallworth to make a career out of it.
“I love people,” Stallworth says. “I try to be as positive as I possibly can.”
A year ago, a white manager of a Nike store in Santa Monica accused him of stealing a $ 12 basketball he had just purchased for his toddler and called police. Nike later apologized and fired the manager.
Stallworth says he’s been thrown into the backseat of a police cruiser for no reason. His goal is for his 2- year- old son to never know that kind of terror and for Floyd’s young daughter to know the power of her father’s life and legacy.
“It saddens me that I can’t even be sad about my shop. But I am thinking about the little girl who will never see her dad physically again. How can I go to her and say: ‘ Hey, they messed up my shop which I have insurance on.’ How can I go to her and say: ‘ I’m mad,’” Stallworth says. “I don’t want her to ever read an article that says the guy at the Small Shop LA is complaining about this after the police stuck his knee on her father’s neck. It doesn’t make me feel right. I can replace everything that was stolen and, if I can’t, who cares?”
A GoFundMe campaign has raised nearly $ 13,000. Stallworth says he will use the funds, not to rebuild, but to “move up.”
“I don’t want to go back to the old ways,” he says. “Why rebuild something that was never for us?”
One morning following the uprisings, Stallworth woke up crying, a mixture of grief at the state of the world and joy at the outpouring of support from the Los Angeles community.
“This right here,” he says, “is going to elevate humanity. We don’t have to look at this as a bad thing as far as the looters. We don’t have to ostracize looters. I don’t 100% agree with them, but people are out here looting because of a Black life, because of a human life, because of a good person’s life, a person who will never see his child again.”
The real looters? “The people who are supposed to protect the law. The looters are the people who stuck their knee down on a man’s neck.”
‘ Here in the Asian community, we see what’s going on’
Under a bright red awning in Seattle’s Chinatown- International District is one of the city’s popular dim sum joints. A colorful mural on the plywood covering the front window shows the cityscape with the message: “We’re open!” Above is a “Black Lives Matter” sign.
In the kitchen, steam rises from pots. Cooks chop ginger, scallions, Chinese broccoli and green beans at a fevered pace. The aroma of pork and shrimp dumplings fills the restaurant as the phone rings with order after order. Not a single ray of sunlight peeks through the boarded- up windows.
“It’s pretty much like a war zone,” says Eric Chan whose family swung open the doors to Jade Garden nearly two decades ago. They’ve been open every day since. But never before have the days been quite this hard or quite this long.
First the coronavirus outbreak that originated in China fueled age- old prejudices against those of Chinese ancestry, hurting business. Then the extended shutdown vaporized 95% of Jade Garden’s sales. Ongoing social distancing regulations have put the restaurant’s future at risk. Even now that Jade Garden is permitted to operate at 25% capacity, such a small restaurant, with just 18 tables, means Chan can only seat diners at four tables.
“This is crippling us,” he says. “We are taking it month by month.”
For up to 14 hours a day, Chan, the first in his family to go to college, has struggled to pay the mortgage and keep afloat the restaurant that is his extended family’s only income.
Jade Garden used to have a staff of 40. Even with a takeout business up and running, employees earning more on unemployment from the safety of their homes decided not to risk returning to work, so Chan’s mother, father, brother, sister, uncle, aunt and best friend from college have pitched in to help the cooks in the kitchen.
The pandemic pressures keep piling up. Higher food costs are taking a bigger bite out of meager margins.
At the end of March, someone cracked a window trying to break into Jade Garden, setting him back $ 2,000. Rather than risking another break- in, Chan paid $ 1,500 to board up all the windows.
Then late on the night of May 31 following peaceful protests, a small group ripped the plywood off the windows, stole money from the cash register and ransacked the restaurant in what Chan believes was the work of a small band of thieves using the protests as cover.
“What happened to George Floyd was disgusting. I feel so terrible. We are not turning a blind eye. Here in the Asian community, we see what’s going on,”
Chan says. “What’s happening is a revolution. But what’s happening with the revolution, you have opportunists who want to take advantage of this for their own personal gain. That’s really hard. It makes me sad and speechless.”
‘ My heart breaks for my fellow business owners’
A stream of haunting images and words on social media about Floyd’s death shook Raleigh, North Carolina, native Megan George Cain while she was holding her newborn son.
“I am a first- time mother. Knowing that my Black son, my African American son, could potentially meet that same fate, hit me like a wave, hit me like a tsunami,” she says. “Because, even though I’m African American, it’s a whole other story when you have the future in your hands and you see how that future can be taken away so viciously.”
The past few months had already been difficult for The ZEN Succulent, her plant and gift shop.
Growing up, her parents’ home overflowed with lush green houseplants – the foyer had a 20- foot palm tree, long vines trailed from the kitchen to the den, the backyard had ferns and hosta plants – and her chore was caring for them all. “I learned to care for something other than myself,” she says.
What began as a passion project in 2012 with her mom Margaret George, a research scientist who moonlights as a terrarium artist, has blossomed into a thriving small business with two airy brick- and- mortar locations and an ecommerce site.
During COVID- 19, she temporarily closed the storefronts in downtown Durham and Raleigh, furloughing most of her employees and making deliveries to people’s doorsteps. With the economy restarting, she was busy restocking The ZEN Succulent and preparing to reopen her stores when streets filled with protesters.
In the early morning hours Sunday, as she was breastfeeding her son, her phone rang. The Raleigh store had been broken into. Cain woke her husband and together they watched a remote video feed.
“You are seeing what’s happening but feeling so helpless. There is nothing we can do. We can’t run out there and stop them,” she says. “The protesters had all gone home. This was a rowdy group that went from street to street breaking things for the sake of breaking things.”
At daybreak, Cain gingerly stepped through broken glass into her store. Alcohol soaked paper goods and plants, her “living inventory.” Pots lay shattered on the floor. An installation by a local artist was torn to pieces. The cash register and purchase order system were broken, laptops stolen.
“You are seeing all of this as you walk by our sign that says, ‘ Black Lives Matter,’ ” she says. “All that hard work going down the drain, your heart sinks. You quickly try to remember that no one was hurt and all of these things can be replaced.”
She’s far from the only one facing a long road back.
“As a Black business owner, my heart breaks for my fellow business owners,” Cain says. “As a Black business owner as well, I feel for the people that thought this was a way to be heard, that their voice was so stifled that they had to go into the streets and riot and burn things and break things because their heart is broken like mine.”