Tag Archives: Laundromats

The Family Business

Throughout my time exploring the many immigrant owned businesses in Hartford, I noticed one factor that stood out.  Family plays an extremely important role in helping and managing the business at hand.  In some cases, it almost seems as though the business would not be able to run at all without this family support.

A classmate and I were given the opportunity to interview the Italian born owner of a Maple Avenue Laundromat.  The Laundromat was a busy place and had clothes piled everywhere.  The customers seemed very diverse, including a large number of Hispanic customers. I know that many Trinity students also go to this Laundromat.  Before the interview even began the owner insisted we wait for his son to come conduct the interview.  He made it seem as though he knew nothing about his own business.  Later he told us “my wife and I run the business together. My son helps do the paperwork and finance.”  When we asked him if he faced any adversities when he first opened his business, he replied, “When I started the paying bills and the paperwork was hardest. Then it got better.”   His son clearly played and continues to play a pivotal role in this business, as he takes the responsibility in paying the bills, which covers for his father’s weakness in finance.

The theme of family in an immigrant business also came up in a discussion in a nearby market and smoke shop.  Unfortunately, that owner was out so we decided to take the opportunity to ask a few questions informally to the man working the counter.

The gentleman turned out to be the father of the owner.  He told us that he works many hours at the counter looking over his son’s new business.  While the father works at the shop, his son is delivering pizza for Dominos.  The amount of support the father was giving to his son and his business astounded me.  It was evident that owning the shop was not enough on its own, so the son had to find other ways to make money.  Without his father working at the shop, it would be very questionable whether the business would still be existent.

I have noticed the importance of family help in my own life and through experience.  My mother, who is an immigrant, opened a restaurant in Boston 15 years ago.  To this day her mother still makes the recipes, her brother has become co-owner, and her sister is the floor manager.  I also help out at the restaurant and often times am happy to do so without compensation.  She has told me that without this support, things would be a lot harder on her and the business. This idea is further expressed in Valdez’s article “Beyond the Ethnic Enclave,” as he writes about how one’s family helps facilitate their entrepreneurship.  Valdez states, “Ethnic business owners often hire family or co-ethnic community from which they emigrated.  Family members experience the “reciprocal obligation” to work in the family business, often without pay” (245).

The family’s role proves to be a unique type of support for immigrant entrepreneurs.  Economically, they provide work and service for the business at little to no cost in many cases.  This service is especially valuable in new businesses when the entrepreneur needs help starting things up.  Morally, the family is there to offer emotional stability and ultimately serves as a sturdy support team.  From my interviews, discussions and experience, it his clear just how much the families of an immigrant business owners contribute to their businesses.

Laundromat SmokeShop

Location, Location, Location

In the beginning of this semester’s research for International Hartford, my team was assigned North Main Street and Maple Avenue for our areas of focus. As the semester progressed and as our research trips matriculated, I began to obtain a better sense of the entrepreneurial activity within each area’s respective immigrant population. North Main Street, true to its cultural reputation, proved to be highly saturated with West Indian owned small businesses, whereas Maple Ave tended to have far less of a unified cultural identity. Moreover, Maple Ave had more of a multicultural identity as there was no single ethnic group that was a majority in this area.

During the cultural auditing stage of our research, I began to notice a common theme or notable strategy in many of the successful business owners I encountered. Intriguingly, I found that this theme appeared again within the individual interviews we conducted with foreign-born owners of well-established businesses. The theme in question is that of identifying the optimal business location. As our guest speaker Sharif Soussi stressed, a key function of entrepreneurs is their ability to recognize and act on a good or service missing to society or a specific community. The ability of entrepreneurs to strategically locate themselves is not only conducive to increasing the utility in their communities by making that void good or service more accessible but it also proves to be a path to high profits for the entrepreneur. Of course, there is also the alternative entrepreneur who creates value not by identifying an unsatisfied demand but by differentiating on a pre-existing good or creating value where it did not previously exist. Now, reverting to the previously mentioned type of entrepreneurship, my team encountered a reoccurring pattern of high levels of competition in close proximity. For example, on Maple Ave we noticed an overwhelming number of barbershops almost one after the next with some barbers situated directly across the street from each other. By the basic laws of supply and demand, such highly concentrated levels of competition ultimately drive prices down. Thus, while advantageous to the consumer, the entrepreneur often struggles in such a competitive arena especially in times of market distress or economic turmoil.

During our interview with the owner of a 25-year-old family-owned successful Laundromat on Maple Ave, the gentleman, from Milan, Italy, highlighted the difficulty of rising competition. Furthermore, when asked what advice he would give to any prospective new business owners, he advised to steer clear of competition. Curious about his adamancy on this matter, I later googled how many Laundromats are on or in close proximity to Maple Ave. Within a five block radius of this establishment, six Laundromats popped up on Google maps. Thus, using the simple tool of Google maps, I was able to pinpoint the venue for this particular service. Furthermore, inquisitive as to the reputation of my interviewee’s business, I was able to read up on the business’s reviews. Mainstream public forum review sites such as Yelp give consumers and, more importantly for this discussion, potential entrepreneurs the ability to get a feel for services and goods present in a community. These seemingly trivial tools of being able to operate Google Maps and being able to surf key review sites such as Yelp, for instance, in my opinion, can be extremely indicative of the competition pool a new entrepreneur may be entering when starting their own business. Hence, if I could make one recommendation to International Hartford, I would suggest that they offer classes or a brief training on instruments such as Google Maps and other such devices to its prospective immigrant business owners.