More than three decades before H Mart opened its first store in Los Angeles, a small mom-and-pop shop in Koreatown was helping homesick Korean immigrants furnish their homes with familiar things from Korea.
Owner Kim Dae-soon founded Kim’s Home Center with his wife, Kim Kwee-yul in 1979. He died Oct. 7 at 91, the store announced on Instagram. His family will lay him to rest on Wednesday, Oct. 28.
Known to English-speaking customers as Kim’s Home Center, the store’s Korean name is 김스전기 (Kim’s Junggi), or “Kim’s Electric,” a name that reflects its beginnings as a shop specializing in electrical goods and appliances.
Madison Cho arrived in Los Angeles as an international student in 1996 and went to Kim’s the following year to furnish her first apartment.
“The first place I went was Kim’s Junggi to grab all I needed for my first apartment. Literally, they had everything I needed,” Cho said, recalling her first visit after learning of Kim’s death.
Cho, who serves on the Wilshire Center-Koreatown Neighborhood Council, remembers when people used the store as a reference point for giving directions around the neighborhood.
“When we described where to meet in Koreatown, we would say, ‘Yeah, from Kim’s Junggi, make a left, or, it’s on the right side of Kim’s Junggi,’” she said. “So it was an iconic Koreatown building there for a while, and along with the Hannam Chain, I think they were the center of the Koreatown.”
Fans and customers left hundreds of comments on the store’s Instagram post, remembering the store as a fixture of their childhoods and a source of comfort for their families.
“We can easily buy almost anything from Korea with just a few clicks today. But decades ago, Kim’s meant so much more to the Korean immigrant community,” one commenter wrote.
Another commenter recalled how the store became part of family traditions while offering their parents a sense of home in a new country.
“Our childhood was filled with trips to ‘Kim’sJungGi’ after church on Sundays, us circling what we want for Christmas from the glossy catalogs, and somehow understanding this was a mecca of comfort for our parents who were homesick for the country they left to make a better life.”
A jingle for the homesick
While the store began with electrical goods and appliances, today its shelves hold a much wider range of household items, including Korean kitchenware, bedding and other goods that could be difficult to find elsewhere.
Kim Dae-soon and his wife, Kim Kwee-yul, opened the store at VIP Plaza in 1979. Ten years later, they moved the store to its current freestanding location at 2940 W. Olympic Blvd. The couple had started small, buying goods at swap meets to repair and resell, and eventually became skilled at repairing vacuum cleaners before saving enough to open the store.
Kim Dae-soon wanted Korean customers to find the household items they knew from home, while keeping prices low. He also wanted to change the way people paid for them.
In the early days, Kim Kwee-yul recalled, customers were accustomed to bargaining.
“Back then, the system was that businesses would ask for a lot and customers would haggle and get a discount,” she said.
Kim Dae-soon grew tired of the time and effort spent negotiating prices and insisted that the store charge low, fixed prices instead. The couple ran the business themselves, and his wife often had to explain to customers that the price on an item was the price they would pay.
The store’s jingle went, “안 깎아도 제일 싸다는 집, 김스전기,” promising customers the lowest prices without haggling. Generations of Korean-speaking households across Southern California came to know the tune, Cho, the neighborhood councilmember, said.
“I remember at a certain time in the afternoon, the Kim’s Junggi commercial would play. I still remember how to sing it,” she said. “So they were a big part of the whole Koreatown community, and overall LA County and Orange County, too, I believe.”
Keeping prices low also meant finding products on his own. Rather than buying from importers and reselling their goods, Kim Dae-soon traveled far and wide to meet manufacturers.
At trade shows, Kim Kwee-yul said, he might spot a product he thought would sell well. But he wouldn’t simply place an order right then and there. He would ask for the manufacturer’s address, visit the company and inspect its facilities and operations before deciding whether to buy.
“He’d say, ‘Ah, I’ll order this after consulting with them,’ and he handled things that thoroughly,” she said.
The duality between Kim Dae-soon’s reserved nature at home and his go-getter attitude at work was something Kim Kwee-yul admired about her husband.
“My husband was so reserved — he hardly ever said a word. It used to be that if he said just three or four sentences in a day, that was it. So, in our house, I was the one doing all the talking, and my husband was the one listening,” she said.
Kim Kwee-yul, 85, is learning to make a home without the husband she shared it with for more than 53 years.
After his death, their daughter, Cyndi, asked whether she wanted to move to a smaller, one-story house. Kim Kwee-yul said no — she wants to stay in the house she had shared with the love of her life.
But the house feels different in ways she can’t quite explain.
“I never really felt like the house was this big — until I had to be by myself like this,” she said. “My daughter asked, ‘Do you want to move to a small, one-story house?’ So I said, ‘No, I want to die right here in this house. I have memories of Dad in this house.’ But then, oh my, as soon as I walk in, why does it feel so empty and why does the house feel so big?’”
A place to find a piece of home
Korean immigrants arriving in LA in the 1980s had few Korean markets to choose from, Cho recalled. Her husband, who came to the U.S. in 1986, remembers shopping at a small Korean grocery store on Irolo Street.
“Kim’s Junggi was a symbol of ‘Oh, we can have everything that we need here,’” she said.
Cho added, “Kim’s is iconic and one of the symbols that we could start a bigger department store from a mom-and-pop. Hope, in a way. A symbol that we can grow.”
Katherine Yungmee Kim, who leads the Koreatown Storytelling Program, an oral history and digital media project at the Koreatown Youth & Community Center, said residents often name Kim’s Junggi when asked about their favorite places in Koreatown.
She has her own reasons for going. When her son needed a rice cooker, that was where she went. She could buy the cooker, then find the rice paddle to use with it.
When her grandmother needed Korean 내복 (naebok), or long thermal underwear, her family knew they could find it at Kim’s.
“There was no other place to get it,” she said. “It’s so specific, but I use that as a story about what that place means.”
She thinks of the kitchen items that are specific to Korean food, including the long chopsticks used for frying. Her father preferred the heavy Korean 이불 (ibul), or comforter, sold at Kim’s because he slept on a hard mat on the floor.
“It really defines a generation of older Koreans and a lifestyle and the things that they have in their homes,” Katherine Kim said. “Kim’s Junggi to me is iconic of Koreatown itself because it represents that piece of home to the early immigrants.”
More than a store
All of Hally Lee’s blankets are from Kim’s.
Lee’s family did not have many opportunities to connect with Korean culture when she was growing up. Her father came to the United States at age five, and they did not attend a Korean church, many of which have traditionally served as cultural and social hubs for Korean immigrants and offer weekend Korean-language schools.
“We didn’t grow up with much of a connection to our culture,” Lee, a San Clemente resident, said. “When I was older and started making money after school, I started going to places like Kim’s Junggi with my grandparents and parents and we’d all have the best time because it was all new to us, new but familiar.”
Her father taught her that once she began earning money, she should give back to the community that had helped raise her.
“And to me, that’s the Korean community,” she said. “So we’d make big lists and make our quarterly trips and do a haul.”
Kim’s has also supported the community over the years. During the pandemic, the store donated 2,000 gift certificates worth $50 each to the local Korean community. More recently, it sponsored a K-pop dance fundraiser hosted by the Anderson Family YMCA in Koreatown.
Thumbing through old, yellowed newspaper clippings during an interview, Kim Kwee-yul recalled that her husband donated about $13,000 — a full day’s earnings — toward a Koreatown senior center in 1986.
Ryan Sally remembers visiting Kim’s as a child, tagging along with her parents and church friends in the early 1990s.
To her, it was just a store full of pots and pans. Money was tight, so her parents told her to choose one item, and Sally picked an alarm clock with orange accents and a cactus wearing sunglasses on top. The cactus danced to the clock’s alarm, a version of “La Cucaracha.”
She was too young to understand why her parents — both Korean immigrants — seemed so taken with the place.
“I was just a kid but I remember my mom and dad’s face while entering the store – a look of awe on their face,” Ryan said. “As if they found treasure in the foreign country we decided to call home.”
