The Advantageous Donut: Popularity
The ownership and operation of donut shops offer two major advantages over other occupations: their preexisting popularity and their economic viability. Before Ted Ngoy ever tasted his first donut, a widespread, highly visible, and readily available donut business infrastructure and donut culture already had succeeded in Los Angeles. The city’s heavy reliance on automobiles and the eventual development of an extensive freeway grid, which, according to Brit- ish design historian Rayner Banham, offered a “comprehensible unity” and “a language of movement, not monument,”12 to otherwise “polymorphous land- scapes,”13 gave rise during the early and mid-twentieth century to a new retail architecture that included supermarkets, strip malls, and drive-ins.14 The ear- liest fast-food establishments, including donut shops, thrived in this commer- cial environment. In 1936, a mere five years after the first retail donut and cof- fee chain opened on the East Coast, a trade publication, Doughnut Magazine, ranked California sixth in the nation for donut consumption, declaring, “Of all the states in the territory which extends from the Rockies to the Pacific, Cal- ifornia has the highest annual total consumption of donuts—10,039,569 doz- ens,” adding with some fervor that “the lusty, growing doughnut business has abundant room in which to grow and expand.”15
This observation proved prescient: the men and women who flocked to Los Angeles both before and after World War II to take jobs in the grow- ing aerospace16 and tire industries17 helped make donuts a favorite local treat and donut shops a standard feature of the retail landscape. By 1950, indus- try analysts considered the California donut market as separate from that of the rest of the United States, even going so far as to identify a regional taste profile: “They really live it up on the West Coast, where the preference is for ‘crunch’ doughnuts. These tasty tidbits are rolled in nuts, cocoanut, or cake crumbs. True to California tradition, they’re spectacular—real big.”18 In 1979, as increasing numbers of Cambodian refugees entered Los Angeles, an
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industrywide survey ranked San Diego and Los Angeles as having the first and second highest densities of donut shops in the nation.19 Shortly thereafter, the success of Cambodians in opening new donut shops caused Los Ange- les to surpass San Diego. Simultaneous growth in what Edward Soja refers to as “high technology industries” combined with an “even greater expansion in low-paying service and manufacturing jobs”20 during this period meant a steady supply of customers for Cambodian donut shops and a constant demand for donuts. In 1995, Seth Mydans noted that “defying California’s health-food trend . . . the number of doughnut shops in the state grew by 55 percent from 1985 to 1993, even as consumption fell by nearly 10 percent.” He added, “In Los Angeles, for example, there is one doughnut shop for every 7,500 people compared with 1 per 30,000 more common elsewhere in the country.”21 Cambodians found a successful business model and then made it work harder and better.