About a half dozen employees waited for customers to trickle in on a searing weekday afternoon at Ching Lau's foot massage spa -- a long, open room lined with armchairs and stools from which masseuses knead pressure points across people's soles. The second-floor storefront near an Asian grocer in Rowland Heights is part of a wave of foot massage businesses that has saturated ethnic-Chinese neighborhoods in Los Angeles County over the last three years.
The popularity of foot massage has risen as cutthroat competition has sent prices downward. But now, business owners are dealing with a new problem: a crackdown by county and state officials who have ruled that they need licenses from the state Board of Barbering and Cosmetology.