Black-Owned Businesses Find O.C. a Tough Sell : Retail: Tiny African American populace finds few firms catering to them. Business owners say lack of a community hub makes it difficult.

Until recently, Eddie Gage and many of his friends walked around Orange County with do-it-yourself haircuts. Their only other choice was to drive to Long Beach to find a barber.

African Americans like Gage who seek services here find that few are offered. And products from black literature to Southern-style barbecue are lacking.

Gage, a 33-year-old private investigator who owns a business in Fullerton, said he usually goes to Los Angeles for shopping, dining and entertainment. “In black Orange County, that’s common practice. That’s what everybody does,” he said. “It’s part of the culture shock when you move to this area.”

At the same time, Orange County shops that cater to African Americans are having trouble staying afloat. Gone are many businesses that thrived during the 1970s and early ‘80s in Santa Ana. Within the past year, the original Burrell’s Barbeque & Cafe at the corner of 3rd Street and North Hesperian Street has closed, as has Kawkab, which imported Ethiopian clothing and Zulu art.

Reggae and funk dance nights have been canceled at the Bombay Bicycle Club in Santa Ana and Club 88 in Irvine.

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Gage said he has found a local barber but has given up trying to shop in Orange County. “Even though there are more businesses oriented toward us,” Gage said, “I don’t even think about it. I go straight to L.A.”

One shop manager, Reginald Manning, is bothered by that attitude. “I see a lack of understanding and connection in the community, very much so,” said Manning, 43, who is vice president of Crescent Books & Tapes in Santa Ana. His store, which has been open for nearly two years, carries books about “history, culture, politics, revolution.”

“I’m not satisfied at all,” Manning said. “I could certainly be busier.”

Merchants catering to black consumers here might anticipate challenges, given the size of the potential customer base. Census data from 1990 shows that only 1.8% of Orange County’s population is of African American descent--about 42,700 people. Another negative is the wide dispersion of African Americans across the county--there is no hub community.

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Yet a large number of the county’s African Americans are affluent professionals, the very customers that businesses would most like to attract. And there is growing sentiment in the Southland that they should spend their dollars with local black-owned businesses.

“We know that Orientals circulate a dollar 12 times within their community before it leaves,” said Lana Smith, a spokeswoman for Recycling Black Dollars, a group of about 2,500 based in Inglewood. And how many times does a dollar circulate in the African American community? “Once,” Smith said.

She said her group had a chapter in Orange County for a short time, but it folded.

Rekindling that spirit is essential, said the Rev. Randall Jordan, minister of Community Cathedral in Fullerton. He and his wife, Joyce, publish a monthly magazine, the Black Orange, that serves as a “pseudo-hub,” as Jordan described it, for the community here.

“Some people will specifically not patronize a business just because it’s African American,” Jordan said. “So I think there’s a necessity for us to buy from black-owned businesses.”

JoEtta Brown, vice president and community outreach coordinator for Irvine-based American Savings Bank, said that many companies owned by African Americans hide that fact. She estimated that 25% of black-owned businesses in Orange County have set up some sort of “front” operation.

“The concern is whether you will have people do business with you if they find out you are African American,” she said.

From Brown’s perspective, the big obstacle for black businesses is lack of access to capital--there are no black-owned banks in Orange County, she said. In contrast, the Vietnamese community of Little Saigon, which encompasses parts of Garden Grove and Westminster, boasts several Asian banks.

Black-owned businesses must bank on more than sentiment to draw customers, said Ken Smikle, publisher of Target Market News, a Chicago-based newsletter that covers African American consumer marketing.

“It’s incumbent on people who have these services to let customers know they don’t have to drive an hour to L.A.,” Smikle said.

He suggested a coordinated effort among African American merchants to market themselves. One message to consumers must be: “This business supports the community you support,” Smikle said. The other: “Businesses should not be selling their image of what they are, but the image of what the customer thinks he or she can be. A lot of our perceptions, as African Americans, about the good life and social progress are wrapped up in what we buy and where we buy it.”

To be successful, he said, a black-owned business must offer the same convenience, quality, atmosphere and selection as any other. On top of that, he said, it must use its sensitivity to the African American consumer as a competitive advantage.

Forming local merchant councils, networking at minority business fairs and joining group purchasing coalitions are other strategies that minority-owned businesses can use, Brown and Smikle said.

For now, though, African American consumers say they are left to travel, fume or do without.

Len Hubbard, a banking consultant who lives in South County, said he has been writing letters for more than two years requesting that his cable-TV company, Dimension Cable, add Black Entertainment Television to its lineup.

“I think the decision to omit BET from their format is wrong,” Hubbard said.

He pointed out that two of his cable channels carry Japanese-language programs and that Japanese Americans, like African Americans, make up only a small portion of Orange County’s population--1.2%, according to the 1990 census.

“BET is in English,” Hubbard said. “There might be some white people who would want to watch it.”