Company: Luna Community Market
Location: 133 Beacon St., Newport
Number of employees: One
Type of business: Convenience store
Owner: Julio Luna
Founded: May 1998
Gross sales: WND
A boxy, gold-painted convenience store in the heart of Newport’s two largest public housing projects is a dream come true for Julio Luna. Not because it allows the father of four to put food on the table. A job removing asbestos from buildings in Lawrence, Mass., allowed him to do that before he moved his family here last spring. And not because the native Dominican’s first enterprise in this country is having success.
Luna and a partner own a successful supermarket back home where Luna also taught business classes at the University of Santa Domingo. Luna Community Market is special for what it means to customers.
“I offer the best prices and the best service in the neighborhood,” Luna said in Spanish, adding that he and his wife, their three sons and an adopted daughter live where the store is located in Tonomy Hill on the border of Park Holm.
Luna’s market is in fact the only source of sundry staples — from milk to guava paste — for the neighborhood’s mixed population. Until about a month after Luna came to the city, the same could be said for Aquidneck Island. Then Rainbow Market opened on Broad Street offering similar items. Still Luna said he doesn’t think of the newer new-comer as competition.
“I don’t compete with anyone. Competition for what?” Luna said. “It’s a service for my neighbors.”
Luna moved to the United States in 1994 propelled by what he described as a “poor economic and political situation” in his homeland and also the prospect of reuniting with relatives living in Lawrence. It was there that Luna encountered an already saturated market for Hispanic commodities but met his wife, Petra Lima Luna. About a year ago, while visiting a friend in Newport, he found the market — literally and figuratively — he was looking for.
Luna rents the approximately 3,500 square-foot space on Beacon Street from the Housing Authority of Newport for $450 a month. It was operating as a convenience store when Luna stumbled across it. But customers said it was understocked with generic supplies whose expiration dates often had passed. By contrast, the shelves at Luna Community Market are full of American and Hispanic brands — from Frito-Lay to Sweet Life and Goya to La Flor. What Luna called “basic vegetables” include iceberg lettuce, yucca, plantains and two kinds of cilantro, among other things.
Earlier in the month Luna was authorized for the Department of Health’s Women, Infants and Children, or WIC, program and food stamps. The state also has authorized him to sell lottery tickets.
Luna declined to put a number on sales for the first six months. However, he said they have tripled since he opened to a mix of white, African-American and Hispanic customers. For inventory, Luna must travel to Providence and Boston. That requires him to leave at five most mornings only to work until nine at night. Luna’s brother, his wife and their sons, ages eight, 10 and 12, help out whenever they can. The store is open every day.
Like most business people, Luna faced obstacles when he first got started. But his job was made easier by previous experience, about $10,000 worth of his own money and what he borrowed from relatives, plus continuous help from Working Capital of Newport. This non-profit, grass-roots program provides technical assistance to entrepreneurs in the form of business education, developing business plans or getting loans, said Tina Jones, the organization’s director.
“Our goal is to keep that money circulating to grow the community,” Jones said. “With Julio, it was easy because he had a vision and he was extremely committed,” Jones said. “Some people think they’re going to start a business and be rich. Julio knew that wasn’t going to happen, and he had a plan.”
For now, that plan entails “getting a feel for the community to know what they want,” Luna said, adding that he jots customers’ suggestions on a notepad. In perhaps another year and a half when he hopes to be free of debt, Luna plans to buy a machine for “pollo al carbon,” or rotisserie chicken and also start selling sandwiches.
“It’s all step by step,” Luna said, adding “a child when it is born doesn’t run.”
“All business is difficult,” he said. Succeeding requires “desire and hope.”
