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.”
Dear Mr. Pelley:
I meant what I said in my letter last week to the 60 Minutes team: joining 60 Minutes is the honor of my career and I am grateful to be working alongside the people who have contributed to the most important television journalism brand this country has ever produced. While I’m new to 60 Minutes, I’ve devoted my career to investigative journalism and storytelling. I started this job excited to collaborate and to benefit from the wisdom and experience of the 60 Minutes veterans, with you among them. For that reason, one of the first things I did in my new role was call you to talk and invite you to dinner. It is a profound disappointment that you rejected that overture and chose ambush instead. Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt. I welcome a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate among the team, but this was nothing of the sort. Yesterday’s performative display of hostility enacted in front of the staff instead of in a civil, private conversation-demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show, or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress. I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama. I am eager to work alongside those who share this goal.
Despite yesterday’s misconduct, I had hoped that in sitting down with you today we could find a path forward together. You made clear that you are not interested in such a path.
Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear. And I have heard you. I therefore write on behalf of CBS News, Inc. (“CBS”) to inform you that your employment with CBS is terminated for cause effective immediately. Enclosed is your formal termination letter.
Sincerely,
Nick Bilton
Executive Producer, 60 Minutes
The co-founder of Aspiration, Joseph Sanberg, was sentenced to 14 years in prison on Monday after defrauding investors and lenders of over $248 million.
The startup, an eco-friendly digital banking company boasting fossil fuel-free investments, carbon offsets for gas purchases, and a debit card with cash-back benefits for shopping at clean companies, was founded by Sanberg and Andrei Cherny. Cherny left the company in 2022 and has not been charged.
Sanberg, an Orange County native, pleaded guilty to wire fraud in October after being arrested in March last year. Aspiration subsequently filed for bankruptcy and liquidated all of its assets by July.
Sanberg and venture capitalist Ibrahim AlHusseini, who also faces charges, together forged a series of bank statements in order to obtain loans. From 2020 to 2021, the pair forged AlHusseini’s bank statements to show millions of dollars in assets in order to obtain millions of dollars from lenders.
Additionally, they forged a letter from their audit committee stating that $250 million in funds were available, when in reality Aspiration had less than $1 million. The amount of loans defrauded exceeded $248 million.
In 2021, Sanberg artificially inflated Aspiration’s 2021 revenue by $44 million by recruiting 27 fake customers to sign letters of intent pledging tens of thousands of dollars per month for tree planting services. Sanberg himself funded the contracts and used the inflated revenue numbers to obtain more loans.
The charges sparked an NBA investigation into salary cap allegations due to Aspiration’s connections with Clippers owner Steve Ballmer.
Ballmer personally invested $60 million in Aspiration, all of which was lost. He is now the target of a civil lawsuit alleging his participation in the scheme. Ballmer denies the allegations.
The team announced a $300-million sponsorship deal with Aspiration, and Clippers player Kawhi Leonard signed a four-year, $28-million marketing contract with the company, which reportedly performed no duties. The issue has raised concerns about how players are circumventing the NBA’s salary cap.
The team lost the $300-million sponsorship deal and an additional $20 million paid for carbon offset purchases.
Residents in the city of Monterey Park will be the first in the nation to vote on a permanent ban on data centers Tuesday.
If approved, Measure NDC would prohibit data centers within the city limits and could only be overturned by another vote.
Yard signs saying “No Data Center” in English and Chinese with images of dragons line sidewalks in the San Gabriel Valley city.
As a wave of data center opposition sweeps the country, numerous towns and counties across the U.S. have instituted temporary moratoria and other restrictions on the facilities. But only a handful have instituted indefinite bans, and just four other towns have sent related matters to the ballot.
Supporters are hoping the vote will set a precedent for the rest of the region, where residents are fighting proposals in Vernon and City of Industry.
“This is about as permanent a ban as we can get,” said Steven Kung, co-founder of the group No Data Center Monterey Park. “Winning Measure NDC would send a huge message to the rest of the San Gabriel Valley about how residents don’t want data centers.”
The ballot measure emerged from the fight against a 247,000-square-foot center proposed in 2024 by the Australian-owned investment firm HMC StratCap for a residential area in Monterey Park.
The facility would have sat less than 500 feet away from the nearest home and used three times the electricity of the 60,000-person, predominantly Asian American city.
While the developer touted the potential for jobs and tax revenue, residents expressed concerns about noise and air pollution, rising electricity rates and a potential to lower property values.
The company pulled its plans in late March following public outcry and a March 4 city council vote to extend a temporary data center moratorium and place a ban on Tuesday’s ballot.
In a letter to the city council, HMC StratCap said it would pursue a different use for the land and would not engage in a ballot measure fight.
The city council later banned data centers indefinitely, the first in California to do so, said Mayor Elizabeth Yang. But she’s still been out campaigning for the measure with all four other council members.
“If a council puts in an ordinance, a future council can reverse it too,” said Yang. “With the ballot measure, unbanning it is a lot harder because you need the entire city to vote on it.”
The measure proposes the ban “to protect air quality, drinking water resources, and public health” and “prevent impacts to electricity and water rates.”
While California places third in the country for existing data centers with about 300 facilities, it hasn’t been a hot spot in the recent AI-driven data center boom. High electricity rates, expensive land and regulatory hurdles mean that fewer, and smaller, facilities are currently planned than in Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Illinois or Arizona.
“Most of California’s data centers are small by today’s standards,” said Shaolei Ren, an engineering professor at UC Riverside who studies how to reduce the environmental impacts of data centers. “Ten years ago, they would be medium-sized, but the power demand for new AI data centers has increased a lot.”
The average operating data center demands 45 megawatts, according to the Washington Post, while the average planned one would draw 430 MW. The one proposed for Monterey Park would have required about 50 MW at peak demand.
As proposals crop up in SoCal, they’re met with fierce opposition. Montebello, El Monte and Baldwin Park have all enacted temporary moratoria, and Alhambra recently banned data centers as part of a zoning code update. City of Industry, Vernon, City of Commerce and Santa Fe Springs are moving in the other direction, trying to court developers and streamline data center approvals. Community groups are fighting that.
Outside the San Gabriel Valley, residents of Coachella and Imperial County are showing up in droves to protest local proposals.
Matthew Shaw, a volunteer with the Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development, who recently published a report on opposition to AI data centers, said a vote to ban them in Monterey Park “would lead to copycats, partially because so many groups are just opposed to any data center development at all.”
While there is no formal opposition to Measure NDC, some building trades like Ironworker Local 433 supported the Monterey Park data center when it was still live before city council. Those in the data center industry are lamenting the state of public opinion.
“These are multi-billion-dollar assets that are built by multi-trillion-dollar companies. These things will get done,” said Mehdi Paryavi, chairman of the International Data Center Authority. “My biggest problem is that our industry does not invest enough in community engagement.”
Paryavi said towns that seek to limit data centers are missing out on thousands of jobs generated by data center construction, operations and customers, as well as faster artificial intelligence speeds and better performance.
Kung said local community organizers are “looking at the empirical evidence” and seeing a ban as a win.
“We’ve never seen a city that embraces a data center and is like, ‘Look how our quality of life has increased, look how all the revenue has gone into citywide improvements,’” he said. “That just doesn’t exist.”
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