Stephanie Nguyen was down on her luck four years ago. When her nail salon business was forced to relocate, the new location she bought at 8915 N. Division St. didn’t work out. Then she experienced the relapse of a rare blood cancer called essential thrombocythemia.
Her nail salon, Foxy Nails, eventually found a new home in Spokane’s Country Homes neighborhood, but the North Division property she bought stood vacant for years. Nguyen ran through various business ideas like an Asian restaurant or a boba tea shop, but it would have been too costly to renovate the former 1970s gas station to suit either.
“I [did] some research,” she says. “I go, ‘Why don’t we do like a little mini [Asian] mart?’”…