De Lauer’s in Oakland Doesn’t Change With Time
De Lauer’s Super News Stand on Broadway in Oakland reminds me of the only general store in the 219-person town of Moose Pass, Alaska.
Both places have a vaguely yellow tint and a “covering-all-the-bases” feel of being the last supply stop for miles in either direction. Tin lunch boxes, cigars, lottery tickets, copies of Faerie magazine, the fifth edition of the Marxist Bulletin, a basketball nightlight, baby oil, shaving cream and pregnancy tests are all available at De Lauer’s.
Being in the store sent me off into a “Mad Men”-inspired flurry to figure out a slogan that would capture the feel of the place.
Something for everyone.
Purgatory, redefined.
Hot off the presses.
The Good News and the Bad.
DeLauer’s: Stay Awhile.
DeLauer’s: Same for over a hundred years. That includes the candy.
De Lauer’s has more publications than a well-stocked doctor’s office waiting room. The place is populated with the kind of material that one skims through at first languidly and then ferociously, with the fervor of someone who didn’t know they were hungry until the first bite.
Between 10:30 and 11:30 a.m. on a recent day, I see about 60 people pass through. In the time that I’m here, a white guy in a camo hunting jacket gets a fair amount of reading done.
The music, cello interspersed with piano, is thick overhead. Purgatory music: serious, but not somber.
Once inside, no customer walks quickly.
The owner, Fasil Lemma, was the store’s manager under the previous ownership. He has owned the place since July 4, 2008, when he bought it from Charles De Lauer, who started the business in 1907.
When I was younger, my grandfather told me that whenever I moved somewhere, I had to pick one place where I would always buy my cigarettes. This, he told my 14-year-old non-smoking self, was “the key to happiness in a strange city.”
A good number of the people that come in appear to be taking my grandfather’s advice. Chris, the cashier whose father owns the place, responds to my question about regulars by saying, “Of course I know their names! If you work here for two years you know many, many people.”
Chris is here seven days a week. When I ask him what his favorite part of the job is, he laughs and says that day-to-day work at the place is “crazy,” but that it started to calm down about six months ago.
“If this weren’t a family business I would never do this job,” he says when asked about how working here compares to other jobs.
The most difficult time is 5–7 a.m. According to Chris, these are the hours of the drunks, the unhoused, and the people who want to haggle about prices.
Fasil tells me that one of the candy brands that De Lauer’s carries was started in 1873. He says he has customers in their sixties who tell him that they love seeing the same candy they bought from De Lauer’s as elementary school students.
A small, elderly Asian man comes in, puts down his cane at the front of the store and starts pulling bottles of root beer out of the beverage case. A few minutes in, he gestures frantically, from the case to Chris and back again. He has every root beer out of the fridge and is yelling “More! From the back! More!”
Chris, calm but game, bounds to the back and returns with a milk carton containing twelve bottles of root beer. I watch the customer diligently take out the bottles and push them toward the cash register.
With the store’s entire supply of root beer in his arms, the man produces a gleeful laugh and sings out “goodbye!” He picks us his cane and bobs of the store, bearing a bag of root beer roughly the size of his lower half.
Chris tells me he likes Oakland, but that his landlord is poised to raise his family’s rent from $1,800 to $2,200. I hope De Lauer’s, which has a second location on Park Street in Alameda, stays in Oakland’s city center.
De Lauer’s is about Oakland. It’s a story of tenacious pockets of sameness amidst a flurry of change. It’s a story of a place that seems designed for passing through, but which is clearly a destination itself.
Thanks for reading. Here are a few of my other stories on race, gender and culture:
