Shopping at Giant Foods

From the 1930s through the 1970s, Chinese American owned supermarkets located outside of Chinatown, catering to a non-Chinese clientele, and featuring mainstream American foods and other products and services rose to prominence and phenomenal success in Northern California, only to decline as union regulations and competition from national chains made their operation unprofitable. Alfred Yee’s study of this trajectory is an insider’s view of a fascinating era in Asian American immigration and entrepreneurship. Drawing on oral interviews with individuals who worked in the business during its peak and decline, he presents an accessible history that illustrates how this once-thriving business fostered the social and economic integration of Chinese Americans into life in the United States.Yee demonstrates how Chinese American supermarkets were able to sell American groceries at reduced prices by using the cheap labor of family members and Chinese immigrants whose entry to the United States had been sponsored by their employers. This type of symbiotic relationship was eventually undermined by labor unions’ demands that employees be covered by labor laws and fully compensated for all hours worked. Also contributing to the ultimate demise of Chinese American supermarkets were increasing costs of capitalization and operation, the dominance of national chain stores, and difficulties arising from traditional Chinese methods of business management.

This book provides a revealing insight into a remarkable chapter of American and Chinese American economic history . . . a valuable source on this thread of Chinese American economic and social history., The unlikely venue of the modern supermarket enables readers to catch glimpses of how Chinese Americans carved out an economic niche for themselves amidst overt and covert discrimination., Yee's accessible study provides rare insights into the business practices and relationships of Chinese-American enterprises, and their historical legacy. As someone who spent fifteen years in the industry, his passion about the subject, first-hand knowledge, and personal contacts made him uniquely qualified to write this study., Yee's ability to bring to the fore differing and often competing perspectives about the supermarket industry makes this work rich and engaging.

Alfred Yee is a lecturer at California State University, Sacramento. Previously, he worked in the grocery business for over twenty years as both an employer and employee.