NYT Magazine: The Food Truck Business Sucks
If you follow the street food scene as closely as we do you’ll want to read this piece in the New York Times Magazine by Adam Davidson from NPR’s Planet Money. He interviews Thomas DeGeest from Wafels & Dinges and the owner of Taim, and gets them to say something that very few vendors will admit publicly… the food truck business stinks. It chooses to focus on the city restrictions more than the actual business model of street food (which also sucks, btw) and compares the street vending scene of Midtown to a third world country.
Posted by Zach Brooks at 3:06 pm, May 7th, 2013 under Street Vendor Issues.
2 Comments | RSS comments feed for this post
2 Comments
-
-
Wanna guess how much a brick and mortar costs to start up and run for a year? This is the reason most eateries in Midtown are corporate shit, and the independent ones have either, bought the building they’re in, or have been alive long enough to have locked in a long term cheap lease. Those leases, when renewed are almost always too high to support these kinds of businesses.
RIP Prime Burger
Seems like there’s a dichotomy between food trucks and food carts that the writer here misses. Each truck alone cost more than the restaurant my parents ran in the Florida suburbs; folks with six-figure corporate backing and college-grad hipster staff can suck it up and pay for a lawyer to navigate the rules. Even if it’s not from a truck, that lobster roll or dinge (What the hell is a dinge, anyway?) will find a way to get sold. The Ecuadorian immigrants are an entirely different story – but do these carts have the same bewildering regulations? I honestly don’t know — I wish Adam Davidson paid a little more attention to that part.