The Table Behind the Bakery

I am always allowing myself to wander down a rabbit hole that is YouTube, and this time it was a story about Henry Sy Sr.

If you've not heard of him, he's pretty popular in Philippine culture, a true rags-to-riches story. Some background, from what I gather: he came to Manila in 1936, at about twelve years old, with nothing to his name, sleeping on the wooden counter of his father's sari-sari store. It's a little neighborhood convenience shop, and it sells whatever you'll need for your day to day. His mother instilled in him the importance of never looking back and always striving. He died one of the wealthiest men in Asia. His SM malls are all over the Philippines, and on Guam there's a mall he owns with an SM store in it.

It's a good story, and as far as I know, it's true. I watched this video, and the thing that sticks out for me is that this store he first sold things out of, they sold in small packets. I think there's a word for it, a sachet economy, where people can't afford the full package so they buy the smaller repackaged version of it. They still do that in the Philippines. You'll see those small sachets not only at a sari-sari store, but also at larger supermarkets.

Buying that way costs more, but to the everyday person in the Philippines at that moment in time, it's all that they can afford in the moment. And, the thing is, the people with the least amount of money pay the highest price for that same soap.

That's not a quirk. That's the machine. It was the machine in 1936 when a twelve-year-old was sleeping on that counter, and it's the machine now, and one boy climbing out of it doesn't change it for anybody still inside.

The annoying thing is, that's just the way things have been happening since 1936, when a twelve-year-old boy decided he could probably make more money doing things that way.

And no matter how you look at it, it's truly costing them more per ounce or per milliliter, but if all they truly have is a quarter, then what do you do?

That's where my head was. Sitting comfortably on the outside of it.

I remember a story my parents told me about first arriving on Guam. Their pay was about four hundred dollars a month. The thing is, four hundred dollars in the mid-seventies is about twenty-five hundred dollars in buying power today, that's just a fact. In the meantime, rent, healthcare, eggs, fuel, et al, are even more expensive. Wages didn't keep up. Maybe my parents never saw it clearly. It's not that it's bad. For them, that situation worked, and if it worked for them, then it must still be a good system, and there's no reason to think otherwise.

I'd lived a comfortable life thanks to my parents' work ethic, but deep down something always ate at me. I had opinions, I always had opinions, and lots of questions.

These days, though, I am a business owner, so I can now have more than opinions. I can put these ideas I had to work, to see if they made sense.

So in our bakery, we pay between twenty-one and twenty-three dollars an hour. The minimum for our area, Daly City, is seventeen fifty. We tried eighteen, but no takers. Eighteen gets you high schoolers, a temporary workforce, which was fine, but we needed people who knew what they were doing, people with rent and kids and a life. So we paid what the work is worth.

For us, the partners, we start at thirty-six thousand a year, and for us it's eighty-eight-plus hours a week. And then, of course, for me and the others there's what I call homework. The store is shut down, but we still have things to do: prep orders, prep ingredients, and for me, emails, data entry, stuff that follows us home. Do the math and we take home about fourteen dollars an hour, and for now that's fine. We're working toward growth. I know it will pay off in the end.

Every so often, when payments don't come in on time, my partners and I delay our pay, a day, or two, maybe a week. It's just what we have to do. We didn't really decide it. It's just what has to happen to make the business survive. I remember watching my parents do this same thing at their bakery.

I keep telling myself I want to work smarter, not harder. But when you have those weeks, the one I just described, you realize: in the first year, you're learning a new business, the area is new, the system is new. Smarter is what I say, but harder is the thing that happens.

Watching from a distance and standing in the box changes you. I'm not saying my parents were wrong, or that Henry Sy was wrong. They lived it, and it worked.

But I still believe there's a piece I get to do differently. Taking care of the people helping me build this, paying them what the work is actually worth, even when it means I take home less than they do, that's not just good business to me. That's the whole point. If the only way through is to grind, then I'd rather grind while making sure the people next to me aren't the ones absorbing the cost of it.

I don't know yet if that makes me right. Maybe it just makes me stubborn.

Which brings me to Dad. He grew up on a farm. I remember his stories of reading comic books while plowing fields with a carabao, reading about Philippine heroes, Rizal and the lot, and somewhere in the middle of all that he decided this isn't the life he wanted. It was good, honest work, and he didn't mind the work, but he felt he wanted more from his life.

He got through college, graduated with a BS in chemical engineering. The reason? My aunt. She had just finished the course and had the books and the coursework, so it was less expensive. He worked at a bakeshop, the kind that doubled as a small cafe and sold a bit of everything, typical of Filipino businesses back then, to get him through school. First as a dishwasher, then eventually as a cashier.

Eventually he got to Guam and a business of his own, a bakery, the family bakery. He gave everything to that bakery. Everything. Any number of memories of Dad are the bakery. I remember making German bread with him. I remember him holding a light while he fixed the generator so we could make bread by a single light bulb on a socket during a typhoon.

Same story as the boy on the counter, more or less. I know that. It doesn't change what it cost.

There was a time, maybe a part of me still believes it, that he only cared for and about the bakery. That's changed somewhat, now that I own a bakery. I mean, I've always understood the need to work at something in order for it to sustain itself, but there wasn't any normal dad-and-son stuff, or so I thought. Maybe all that we shared, the work, the generator fixing, all of it, that was his love. I didn't understand what it cost him to be there at all until I was the one standing where he stood.

But here's the thing I did that he didn't.

We rent the house behind the bakery. My commute is a set of stairs, a door, a small entry, another door, and I'm home. And every night, we stop. Me and Lyn, Leno and Mercy, Leo when he's not up in Sacramento with his family, sometimes his wife when she's in town. Five of us, six of us. Whoever cooks, cooks. We put it on the table and we share it and we tell stories. We laugh. We talk about who we were when we were young. That's an hour that isn't the bakery, in a life that is otherwise entirely the bakery.

And I don't work Sundays. Not ever. Sundays are church, laundry day, and trying a new restaurant in Daly City, or a walk at the park down the street, or just dating my wife. The paperwork can wait.

I see the difference. Same hours. Same math. Same delayed pay. The time off is non-negotiable.

The story says the empire is the prize. I think the prize is the people you help along the way.

I've been in the shop almost a year now, and I don't know if that's right. The empire isn't the win. It's what pays for the life.

I don't know how this ends. Obviously I won't stand idly by. I'll put in the work, but I won't run myself ragged doing it. Maybe we make it and maybe we won't, and I already know that this will not be a referendum on how hard we tried. I do know what I'm not willing to trade for it, and I only know it because a man I loved traded it, and I spent fifty-nine years not being sure I truly knew him.

So for now, I'll take the fourteen bucks an hour, and at the end of the day I'll go up the stairs, through the two doors, and eat with my wife and my cousins. Somebody will share a story we've all heard before, and we'll laugh anyway.

That's not the sacrifice. That's the point.