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Marta Montoya has owned Tienda La Luna on Central Avenue since 2001, selling phone cards, groceries and money transfers to Charlotte's Spanish-speaking population.
But as construction jobs have dried up, so has her customer base – primarily immigrants from Mexico and Central America. State figures show Charlotte-area construction employment is down 12 percent in the year since March 2008.
“All our customers are going back, going back,” Montoya said. “They don't have jobs, they don't have money to pay rent… We've never been like this before, never.”
To keep things going, Montoya has had to cut back employee hours and reduce the number of people working at one time. Instead of two employees in the morning and three in the afternoon, now there are only one and two. A security officer has been cut to three days per week.
The store is also increasingly relying on sales of prepaid phone cards and groceries.
A lot of the store's business is in wire transfers of money from Charlotte workers to their families in their home countries. In years past, La Luna would handle about $4,000 a month, Montoya said. Now it's about $2,000 per month.
“It's more work and less pay,” Mata Gonzales, who raises three kids while her husband works in construction, said in Spanish while shopping at the store Tuesday. His work now brings in about $100 per week. “It's nothing,” Gonzales said.
But because of the recession, employees aren't going anywhere. They are happy to have the work they do have.
“There's no other work,” Jhon Jhincapie, who has worked at La Luna for six years, said in Spanish. He still regularly sends money back to his family in Colombia, but has had to send less in recent months. “It's difficult for me here and for them there.”
