Many of the shops are owned by immigrants from Sri Lanka.
Indeed, two stores include Sinhalese in their names. The clerks, too, when I went, were almost exclusively of Sri Lankan descent. The largest Sri Lankan population in the city is in Staten Island, which makes for a quick commute back and forth over the Verrazano. The owners are elusive: I figured this wasn't like walking into a Starbucks with the expectation of seeing Howard Schultz. These are small, independent businesses, and you'd think at one point in seven days, making regular visits, you'd have one encounter with the head honcho.īut in trips to all of them, talking to dozens of counter workers, not a single one professed to know the owner. The answers ranged from the plausible, 'This is my first day,' to the laughable. 'This is my first day,' said the same employee the next day when I popped in. 'He'll be here at 10 tonight,' a clerk at Jayoda Video told me on a Monday morning. When I arrived that night, another said he always came in at '10 a.m.' The next morning, the clerk from the previous day said he was there last night.
