Business
Nearing 80, she can no longer afford to own Arcadia’s Book Rack — or live in California
“Welcome to the Book Rack,” Karen Kropp says, her eyes panning the increasingly sparse shelves inside her bookstore.
“It used to be a lot fuller.”
After 40 years — the last half under Kropp’s ownership — the beloved used-book store tucked between a hot pot restaurant and a chiropractor’s office in Arcadia is closing this week.
Slowed down by the consumer shift to online shopping and further decimated by cratering sales during the pandemic, the shop held on by a thread in the months since Kropp cashed out her life insurance policy to keep it afloat.
Karen Kropp pauses among the increasing empty shelves at the Book Rack, a bookstore she has owned for nearly two decades.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
“The miracle is coming,” Kropp often assured herself. “When you’re in a bookstore, you have to be a dreamer.”
But the miracle never came, and Kropp, who turns 79 later this year, knew that even if she couldn’t really afford to, it was time to retire.
She plans to live off her monthly Social Security check — around $1,200 after insurance premiums are deducted — and can’t afford to stay in Southern California. Instead, she will move in with her younger sister in Albuquerque once she finishes clearing out the shop.
“When you’re in a bookstore, you have to be a dreamer.”
— Book Rack owner Karen Kropp
“I put everything I had into this place,” she said. “Everything.”
Kropp’s situation mirrors those of many aging small-business owners who, unless they have a relative eager to take over, are faced with complex questions about their legacy and finances.
In January, the owner of Vroman’s, a historic independent bookstore in Pasadena, announced on Instagram that, as his 80th birthday approached, he planned to retire and sell the shop to someone outside his family.
“This was not an easy decision for me,” he wrote, adding that the store had been under his family’s stewardship for more than a century.
The owner of Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena recently announced that he plans to retire and sell the shop to someone outside his family.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Retirement in the U.S. is a patchwork system with “a really big gaping hole” for self-employed people such as Kropp, who never worked for a large employer that offered 401(k) matching contributions, said Nari Rhee, director of the Retirement Security Program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
Someone in Kropp’s situation — a single renter living in L.A. County — needs $2,915 a month to cover their basic necessities, Rhee said, citing a figure calculated using the Elder Index, a tool developed by the University of Massachusetts Boston to measure how much older Americans need to cover basic living expenses.
“That is basically twice the average Social Security benefit in California,” Rhee said, noting that, in recent years, more older Californians have fallen into poverty and aged into homelessness.
“It’s a crisis.”
Almost 30 years ago, soon after moving west from Green Bay, Wis., Kropp got a job at the Book Rack, then on Baldwin Avenue, a short drive from the current location.
She started as a clerk, earning around $3 an hour to price and organize books, and adored her boss, Pat Carlson, the shop’s original owner. For someone whose main childhood gripe with the library was that it limited how many books she could check out at once, it felt like a dream that someone paid her to bond with customers over a love of books. (Her favorite is “The Great Gatsby.”)
“Readers are different,” she said. “They’re thinkers.”
The shop eventually moved to the current location and, after Carlson died, the owner’s husband offered to sell it to Kropp, then 60. She purchased it in 2006 for around $100,000, pulling from her savings, as well as some from her daughter and a sum she inherited after her father’s death to cover the down payment.
“It’s been a joy,” she said of owning the store.
Karen Kropp hands a customer their books at the Book Rack.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
They were often busy in the early years, and she hired local high school students to help run the shop, although she manned it alone most of the time, working 10-hour shifts. They often did more than $10,000 in sales per month back then, but things slowed as customers adjusted to the click-and-receive-in-48-hours model of the Amazon era.
“Everybody wants it now,” she said. “And I can’t do that.”
In the months before the pandemic, Kropp considered selling the shop and moving closer to her children, grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, but she decided to hold on a bit longer.
Then, during the shutdowns, sales dropped to almost zero. Bills still came due, as did the shop’s rent and the fee for a storage unit where she kept overflow books, which together cost about $2,000 a month.
Karen Kropp rings up a customer at the Book Rack during a liquidation sale before the shop closes.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Sales eventually crept back up but never fully recovered; now, she said, it sometimes takes two days before sales hit $200.
After the hardest times, a bright spark always followed — a busy week, a special interaction between customers. After one such spark in late 2022, she cashed out her $50,000 life insurance policy, receiving only $5,000 even though she’d paid $18,000 into it.
She put the payout toward bills, rent and payroll. For the first time in 20 years, her passion started to feel like a job. She realized that she had left no part of herself for herself — every spare second and thought had gone into the shop.
It was time.
On a recent morning, Kropp sat behind the counter, next to a gift basket with peanut M&Ms dropped off by a customer and stacks of books she planned to donate if they didn’t sell by the official closing date, Feb. 28. (She has a personal policy: No book ends up in the trash unless it’s moldy or there’s evidence an animal has been living inside.)
A man steadying himself with a cane walked through the door and she greeted him.
“Boy, I’m sorry to hear you guys are leaving,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, nodding.
As was often the case, books triggered memories and he began to tell her about how, in his 20s, he traveled California in a camper van reading novels by the mystery writer John D. MacDonald. He was looking for one of his books called “The Long Lavender Look.”
Kropp nodded and her friend Peter Tran, who sometimes volunteers at the shop, took off toward the back of the store, quickly locating a yellowing copy. With the liquidation sale discount, the customer paid $1.10 for the paperback.
A longtime customer, whose artwork used to line the walls of the Book Rack, gave Kropp a painting of the storefront.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Danielle Rosaria Nahas, a customer who lives down the street, walked in with her daughter. An artist, Nahas was carrying a painting of the storefront she had made for Kropp.
“Thank you, sweetie,” Kropp said, her emerald eyes dampening with tears. “This is beautiful.”
Nahas had written the family’s address on the back of the wood frame.
“So if you ever miss us,” she said, “you could write to us.”
Nahas doesn’t have family in the area, she said, and her children had come to think of Kropp as a grandma. Her family created a home library with books from the shop during the pandemic and Kropp, she said, had always made her and her daughter, Amy Rose, 8, who has autism, feel so welcome.
The little girl sprinted toward the children’s section, twirling.
“Books, books, read,” she said aloud.
A few minutes later, a woman arrived with a list of several titles. She was putting together an auction item with a T-shirt that said “I’m with the banned,” as well as some commonly banned books.
Karen Kropp reaches for a book for a customer at the Book Rack.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
Kropp squinted at the list, noticing it didn’t include authors’ names, which is how the store is organized. She closed her eyes for a moment, conjuring a name.
“Oh, Cisneros!” she said to herself, as she walked to snag a copy of “The House on Mango Street.”
“My brain has always been my computer,” she said.
After the customer left, the shop got quiet and Kropp and Tran reminisced. Then they got quiet too.
“The end of the chapter,” he said softly.
“But,” Kropp said, smiling, “it was a long chapter.”
Business
California-based company recalls thousands of cases of salad dressing over ‘foreign objects’
A California food manufacturer is recalling thousands of cases of salad dressing distributed to major retailers over potential contamination from “foreign objects.”
The company, Irvine-based Ventura Foods, recalled 3,556 cases of the dressing that could be contaminated by “black plastic planting material” in the granulated onion used, according to an alert issued by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Ventura Foods voluntarily initiated the recall of the product, which was sold at Costco, Publix and several other retailers across 27 states, according to the FDA.
None of the 42 locations where the product was sold were in California.
Ventura Foods said it issued the recall after one of its ingredient suppliers recalled a batch of onion granules that the company had used n some of its dressings.
“Upon receiving notice of the supplier’s recall, we acted with urgency to remove all potentially impacted product from the marketplace. This includes urging our customers, their distributors and retailers to review their inventory, segregate and stop the further sale and distribution of any products subject to the recall,” said company spokesperson Eniko Bolivar-Murphy in an emailed statement. “The safety of our products is and will always be our top priority.”
The FDA issued its initial recall alert in early November. Costco also alerted customers at that time, noting that customers could return the products to stores for a full refund. The affected products had sell-by dates between Oct. 17 and Nov. 9.
The company recalled the following types of salad dressing:
- Creamy Poblano Avocado Ranch Dressing and Dip
- Ventura Caesar Dressing
- Pepper Mill Regal Caesar Dressing
- Pepper Mill Creamy Caesar Dressing
- Caesar Dressing served at Costco Service Deli
- Caesar Dressing served at Costco Food Court
- Hidden Valley, Buttermilk Ranch
A Stanford software engineering degree used to be a golden ticket. Artificial intelligence has devalued it to bronze, recent graduates say.
The elite students are shocked by the lack of job offers as they finish studies at what is often ranked as the top university in America.
When they were freshmen, ChatGPT hadn’t yet been released upon the world. Today, AI can code better than most humans.
Top tech companies just don’t need as many fresh graduates.
“Stanford computer science graduates are struggling to find entry-level jobs” with the most prominent tech brands, said Jan Liphardt, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University. “I think that’s crazy.”
While the rapidly advancing coding capabilities of generative AI have made experienced engineers more productive, they have also hobbled the job prospects of early-career software engineers.
Stanford students describe a suddenly skewed job market, where just a small slice of graduates — those considered “cracked engineers” who already have thick resumes building products and doing research — are getting the few good jobs, leaving everyone else to fight for scraps.
“There’s definitely a very dreary mood on campus,” said a recent computer science graduate who asked not to be named so they could speak freely. “People [who are] job hunting are very stressed out, and it’s very hard for them to actually secure jobs.”
The shake-up is being felt across California colleges, including UC Berkeley, USC and others. The job search has been even tougher for those with less prestigious degrees.
Eylul Akgul graduated last year with a degree in computer science from Loyola Marymount University. She wasn’t getting offers, so she went home to Turkey and got some experience at a startup. In May, she returned to the U.S., and still, she was “ghosted” by hundreds of employers.
“The industry for programmers is getting very oversaturated,” Akgul said.
The engineers’ most significant competitor is getting stronger by the day. When ChatGPT launched in 2022, it could only code for 30 seconds at a time. Today’s AI agents can code for hours, and do basic programming faster with fewer mistakes.
Data suggests that even though AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic are hiring many people, it is not offsetting the decline in hiring elsewhere. Employment for specific groups, such as early-career software developers between the ages of 22 and 25 has declined by nearly 20% from its peak in late 2022, according to a Stanford study.
It wasn’t just software engineers, but also customer service and accounting jobs that were highly exposed to competition from AI. The Stanford study estimated that entry-level hiring for AI-exposed jobs declined 13% relative to less-exposed jobs such as nursing.
In the Los Angeles region, another study estimated that close to 200,000 jobs are exposed. Around 40% of tasks done by call center workers, editors and personal finance experts could be automated and done by AI, according to an AI Exposure Index curated by resume builder MyPerfectResume.
Many tech startups and titans have not been shy about broadcasting that they are cutting back on hiring plans as AI allows them to do more programming with fewer people.
Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei said that 70% to 90% of the code for some products at his company is written by his company’s AI, called Claude. In May, he predicted that AI’s capabilities will increase until close to 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs might be wiped out in five years.
A common sentiment from hiring managers is that where they previously needed ten engineers, they now only need “two skilled engineers and one of these LLM-based agents,” which can be just as productive, said Nenad Medvidović, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California.
“We don’t need the junior developers anymore,” said Amr Awadallah, CEO of Vectara, a Palo Alto-based AI startup. “The AI now can code better than the average junior developer that comes out of the best schools out there.”
To be sure, AI is still a long way from causing the extinction of software engineers. As AI handles structured, repetitive tasks, human engineers’ jobs are shifting toward oversight.
Today’s AIs are powerful but “jagged,” meaning they can excel at certain math problems yet still fail basic logic tests and aren’t consistent. One study found that AI tools made experienced developers 19% slower at work, as they spent more time reviewing code and fixing errors.
Students should focus on learning how to manage and check the work of AI as well as getting experience working with it, said John David N. Dionisio, a computer science professor at LMU.
Stanford students say they are arriving at the job market and finding a split in the road; capable AI engineers can find jobs, but basic, old-school computer science jobs are disappearing.
As they hit this surprise speed bump, some students are lowering their standards and joining companies they wouldn’t have considered before. Some are creating their own startups. A large group of frustrated grads are deciding to continue their studies to beef up their resumes and add more skills needed to compete with AI.
“If you look at the enrollment numbers in the past two years, they’ve skyrocketed for people wanting to do a fifth-year master’s,” the Stanford graduate said. “It’s a whole other year, a whole other cycle to do recruiting. I would say, half of my friends are still on campus doing their fifth-year master’s.”
After four months of searching, LMU graduate Akgul finally landed a technical lead job at a software consultancy in Los Angeles. At her new job, she uses AI coding tools, but she feels like she has to do the work of three developers.
Universities and students will have to rethink their curricula and majors to ensure that their four years of study prepare them for a world with AI.
“That’s been a dramatic reversal from three years ago, when all of my undergraduate mentees found great jobs at the companies around us,” Stanford’s Liphardt said. “That has changed.”
Walt Disney Co. is expanding its presence in the Middle East, inking a deal with Saudi media conglomerate MBC Group and UAE firm Anghami to form a streaming bundle.
The bundle will allow customers in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE to access a trio of streaming services — Disney+; MBC Group’s Shahid, which carries Arabic originals, live sports and events; and Anghami’s OSN+, which carries Arabic productions as well as Hollywood content.
The trio bundle costs AED89.99 per month, which is the price of two of the streaming services.
“This deal reflects a shared ambition between Disney+, Shahid and the MBC Group to shape the future of entertainment in the Middle East, a region that is seeing dynamic growth in the sector,” Karl Holmes, senior vice president and general manager of Disney+ EMEA, said in a statement.
Disney has already indicated it plans to grow in the Middle East.
Earlier this year, the company announced it would be building a new theme park in Abu Dhabi in partnership with local firm Miral, which would provide the capital, construction resources and operational oversight. Under the terms of the agreement, Disney would oversee the parks’ design, license its intellectual property and provide “operational expertise,” as well as collect a royalty.
Disney executives said at the time that the decision to build in the Middle East was a way to reach new audiences who were too far from the company’s current hubs in the U.S., Europe and Asia.
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