3. Was Suchin an entrepreneur? If he was an entrepreneur, what role or roles was he playing—

founder, buyer, or owner-manager—at the time he opened Global Foods?

Small business to the rescue! It had to be a heady day when Suchin Prapaisilp signed an agreement with the city of Kirkwood, Missouri, to open a Global Foods supermarket in 1998. The store had become available again. A&P supermarkets couldn’t make it there by the 1970s. National Supermarkets couldn’t make it there by the 1990s. And a team of local grocery managers couldn’t make it there by 1998, but Chin (as he’s known locally) was sure he could. And he was so sure that he convinced Kirkwood’s city council to grant him a favorable package to make it happen. The deal was that the store would offer half traditional American foods for the local community and half international foods for the regional community.
As satisfying as that moment in the public and industry spotlight was, it was a long road getting there.
When he came to America in 1974, 22-year-old Chin’s day stretched from 4 A.M. to midnight. He worked for others making donuts, then doing a factory shift. He closed the day as a kitchen helper. In his off hours he taught dance and even delivered phone books. But his philosophy is, “You work hard, you can make it.”
Chin and his newly arrived brother Chatchai opened a small grocery store in St. Louis in 1975, and in 1986 opened a bigger grocery that became the anchor for a miniboom of Asian businesses in the neighborhood.
This kind of steady growth gave Chin the experience and capital to aim for an opportunity like Global, which would take $2.15 million for the building and improvements. But even with experience and capital, as one of Chin’s American employees at Global volunteered, “They took a big gamble opening the store.”