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Mr. Chen's Chinatown. "I like pioneer things," says James Chin-Cheng Chen, who nine years ago built "America's first 'master-planned Chinatown'" in Las Vegas, as reported by Barry Newman in The Wall Street Journal. At the time, fewer than 10,000 Chinese populated the state of Nevada, and unlike the situation in urban coastal locales, they didn't cluster into neighborhoods -- and there was no Chinatown. To test the viability of creating one from scratch, Mr. Chen first opened a video store. It wasn't a lucrative business, but it enabled Mr. Chen to collect customer zip codes, which "gave him a map of where Las Vegas Asians lived."
Armed with his zip-code data, Mr. Chen and a pair of partners purchased "eight acres on Spring Mountain Road," a spot that's "rarely more than 10 miles away " from the developments where Asians were buying houses. "We don't go to the neighborhood," explains Mr. Chen's son, Alan. "The neighborhood comes to us." This build-it-and-they-will-come gambit was solidly anchored by a major drawing card in the form of 99 Ranch, 99ranch.com -- "America's biggest Asian supermarket chain with 26 west-coast stores and franchises in Phoenix and Atlanta." Mr. Chen also recruited Sam Woo BBQ, and then a whole pack of other businesses -- a "hair salon, jeweler, florist and optometrist ... travel, real estate and insurance agencies ... pharmacy, bakery and bookstore ... the offices of the Las Vegas Chinese Daily News ..."
Voila! (pardon the French) ... Mr. Chen had created Chinatown Plaza, lvchinatown.com, a new kind of shopping center that Dr. Min Zhao of UCLA calls "a new form of social organization for America's migrating immigrants." She comments: "When people have to drive for miles, they want to spend a day ... Nobody lives in it, but it becomes the meeting place, the center of a community." That center is now expanding, with development of the Great China Plaza right next door to Mr. Chen's Chinatown Plaza, and the soon-to-open Pacific Asian Plaza, a mile up Spring Mountain Road. Mr. Chen says he's pleased to have the competition: "That means we did good," he says. "Our vision was correct." He likely can expect even more company: "The U.S. now has 12 million Asians," and their buying power totals $344 billion," according to the Selig Center for Economic Growth.
Mr. Propstra's Burgerville. When the big, national fast-food chains moved into his neighborhood, George Propstra, founder of a Vancouver, Washington-based restaurant chain called Burgerville, knew he needed to do something different, reports Brian Libby in The New York Times. "We needed to focus on what we do well," says Jack Graves, Burgerville's operations chief, "and that's our relationship with local growers and ranchers and dairies." And so Burgerville, burgerville.com, which has about three dozen locations in Oregon and Southwest Washington, unleashed a parade of local seasonal specialties.
In the merry month of May, "Burgerville goes through thousands of local strawberries for its shortcake." The chain also offers a limited-edition cheeseburger in May, featuring "Rogue River artisinal blue cheese." In June and July, it's Walla Walla onion rings. "It's fast and furious and then they're gone," says Mr. Graves. In August it's blackberry shakes, and come November, the specialty is sweet potato fries. Somewhere in between Burgerville serves up Huckleberry milkshakes -- but not for long because "the berries are not grown commercially, so the company gets them from a local supplier who relies on individual pickers selling by the pound." Should you miss the huckleberries, there's always the blackberry shakes.
"Every summer I start watching for their commercials to find out when the blackberry shakes will be available," says Denise Pisha, a customer. "The fact that they actually use fresh berries in the shakes is something you don't find in many fast food places." Denise says she's actually not quite sure what's in those other shakes altogether. Anyway, the local strategy has worked well for Mr. Propstra's Burgerville, which actually has been around since 1961. In fact, it has worked better than it could have imagined in some ways -- its move to local, free-range Oregon Country Beef coincided with the outbreak of mad cow disease (reported just an hour's drive north of its headquarters). Bottom line is, Burgerville says it has swapped its previously eroding market share for a 14 percent increase in sales this year.
Tim Manners, editor
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