The secret of Indian store owners – YouTube Dictation Transcript & Vocabulary

1.you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent to fully mind I'm not joking Joe Biden said that in 2006 when he was running for president and it caused a bit of a stir but if you paid any attention at all you'd know that it was based on a bizarre absolutely true fact indian-americans and pakistanis absolutely dominate many markets and convenience stores nationwide they own close to half and in some regions it's higher it's a retail Empire that sells a half a trillion dollars per year that's $500,000 million this is from a group of people who make up only 1 and a half% of the US population so the elephant in the room is why I mean there's a lot of jobs in America why 711s and mini Mars hey I'm Ken Lort I like digging into awkward questions and bringing some reasonableness to the discussion and every time I do I seem to find lessons that apply to how people in societies function in general en I'll take us to why Indians own convenience stores specifically we'll look at the historical context that got them to that point and we'll look at the racial tensions that come when one ethnic group owns a lot of stores in lower income areas okay so why convenience stores they became the go-to business for Indian immigrants for a combination of cultural values practical limitations business Savi and history for newcomers with limited English skills convenience stores are they're they're just a convenient business to run you don't need a deep command of English to interact effectively with your customers but equally important to this probably even more so is family labor Indian families often live together and work as a unit the skills needed to work in these stores are are basic enough that family members can be trained quickly and even kids can handle some of the work often time everyone pitches in parents kids cousins having a tight-knit family working together solves a lot of business problems employee theft especially given the cash nature of the stores or covering shift schedules or worrying about getting sued over sometimes complicated labor laws it's a communal approach that reduces operating costs and risks and you have to recognize Indian and Pakistani immigrants have a willingness to work I mean a lot sometimes 80 hours a week or more in these stores which gives family run units another Edge when your whole family is invested you can keep the store open longer hours without paying extra staff and those extended hours means more money especially in urban areas where late night shopping is common at the same time the nature of convenience stores means there's a lot of downtime kids can do homework and adults aren't constantly on their feet like they might be at a busy restaurant and in a lot of cases Family Support also lets owners in their families expand they'll buy one store where everyone works allowing them to all learn the business and save money eventually other family members buy another shop and that cycle continues and the investment required to get started it's not nothing but it's relatively low other retail shops and restaurants can have a much higher overhead head and sometimes more than one family will pull their resources together and get started working together overall convenience stores do pretty well when the economy is tight but in the 1990s the industry took a hit and that helped the Indians overall with lower overhead the ones run by those families survived better and often took over other stores that went bankrupt one entrepreneur HR Shaw bought 300 stores at 30 cents on the dollars Revitalize them and then flip them to other Indian and Pakistani buyers but but how did it all get started started how did these Indian immigrants end up in the United States looking for work in the first place hey this is a good time to let you know if I make a substantive mistake let me know I'll fix it in a pin comment below okay so before 1965 America's immigration system had racial quotas designed to keep the country majorly white and European but the immigration and nationality act then it erased those quotas and it prioritized two things family relationships and professional skills the law was designed to find educated professionals doctors engineers and skilled workers who could help America grow but when they got here a lot of those qualified immigrants discovered their degrees just were useless here their job experiences were sometimes dismissed and the language barrier was just sometimes too much of a challenge many found themselves unable to practice their trained professions but didn't want entry-level corporate positions or anything like that instead they opted to go into business for themselves and just so you know this pattern of immigrant groups running specific Industries it's not really unusual American Jews owned a lot of the corner stores in Delhi in the early 20th century Vietnamese immigrants today they run the nail salon industry Cambodian immigrants dut shops this kind of clustering occurs for a few reasons successful Pioneers in these businesses they create blueprints for others to follow they have to learn about permits suppliers possible pitfalls and they share this knowledge with their immigrant communities so newcomers can come into that same industry and these ethnic networks can provide important resources from startup capital to business advice to Reliable employees when immigrants are new to a country they tend to trust and depend on their own community that helps explain why here in the US many convenience stores aren't just owned by Indians they're mostly owned by people from one specific Indian state of the 880,000 convenience stores owned by Indian immigrants about 60,000 of them belong to people from gared that's no coincidence they have a centuries old reputation for business smarts and they brought that entrepreneurial spirit with them to the United States overall the success of these stores often comes down to a simple formula hard work family cooperation and a willingness to serve communities that others might avoid but when one ethnic group gets a monopoly on a business racial tensions often follow close behind people served by that group often accuse them of exploiting those in the community stealing their jobs stealing their business opportunities or just charging them too much throughout history we've seen this in Wilmington North Carolina 1898 white gangs destroyed blackowned businesses murdered black residents and effectively staged a coup motivated by General racism but also a fear that black men would steal their homes and their jobs in Tulsa Oklahoma in 1921 a white mob destroyed the town's Black Wall Street District they burned 1,400 blackowned businesses and homes and by the end there were hundreds dead during the Chicago riots in 1919 Irish ameran mobs attack black businesses and residents and there have been ongoing clashes between owners and their customers throughout history in the early 1900s New York Jewish Merchants dominated retail in black neighborhoods and the relationship was complicated Jewish store owners provided needed services but many black residents resented their control and their success Detroit it became known as the Ellis Island for Arab immigrants and many open convenience stores in mainly black neighborhoods by the 1980s black residents complained about high prices poor food quality and that the Arab store owners only hired Arab workers that's a complete with immigrant communities owning businesses Arab store owners faced violence and hundreds were killed over the years in robberies and attacks but few things compared to the 1992 Los Angeles riots when the Rodney King verdict came down Decades of Korean versus black tensions exploded it ended up with 63 deaths and 2400 people injured Korean businesses had moved in after Jewish owners moved out and they bore much of the damage at the end 2200 stores were destroyed in 6 days the store owner felt abandoned by the police and we saw it in the famous rooftop Koreans images of owners armed with rifles defending their businesses from the rooftops the bad feelings between the two groups had been building for a long time the year before the riots a Korean store owner shot and killed 15-year-old Latasha Harland after suspecting the girl of shoplifting and in the Years prior at least 19 Korean shopkeepers had been killed in Southern California mostly by black perpetrators it's part of the reason why they had guns ready when they headed to those rooftops Indian and pakistanis haven't faced that level of violence specifically targeting them part of that might be timing their rise in the convenience store world happen more gradually over the 80s and '90s and to an extent they tend to spread out more geographically instead of clustering in a single neighborhood which might make them a central focus when unrest starts still stores that stay open late at night are often targets for criminals but overall it's a wild success story that we should all pay attention to I mean most of these store owners wanted to build stepping stones for their kids to succeed in America and it worked the vast majority of second generation indian-americans have white collar jobs like over 70% and they're absolutely killing it in the tech industry and financially overall I produced another video just about that and I've link to that in the comment section below look the lessons of hard work education and delayed gratification they can sound like raw raw phrases to some but they're absolutely true and there is no better path to success sometimes those truths are clear in the videos I research like this one other times I learn the opposite that sometimes a lot of people get together and fool us all I learned that when I did a deep dive into plastic recycling an Unholy Alliance of plastic manufacturers environmentalists and politicians lied to everyone and we're all living in a recycling fantasy it's an interesting story hey I learned a lot making this video and I hope I shared some of that with you come back again