Food Vendors Play the Corners

It was early Saturday morning and Effie Tsatsaronis sat at her desk in what used to be the Manhattan Food Vendors Association. She is a young woman with long, curly brown hair, and she was suffering from a slight cold. "I'm dying for a Starbucks right now."

Tsatsaronis started at the Vendors Association as a volunteer four years ago, when the city was threatening to ban vendors from large sections of midtown. The threat has since subsided and the Association has dissolved, but Tsatsaronis has stayed on. She now runs her office as a private business. She is a food vendors' advocate. "We mainly deal with their license renewals and permit applications. And we fight their violations also."

To become a food vendor in New York City is no easy trick. One needs a license, a cart, a garage and a permit. Licenses cost $50 and are easily obtained. Carts are also easy to find, but they're more expensive. "They start from $4000-$5000 for a hotdog stand and they go up to $25,000. Some of them cost a fortune." Garage expenses typically run $150-$300 a month.

The real challenge, however, is getting a permit. The city sells permits for $50-$200, but it restricts the number of permits issued. "There is no availability of permits right now. Every two or three years there is a lottery, and there's a lot of people going into the lottery. There are only 4000 permits out there and there are 10,000 vendors. It's a situation that creates working relationships."

It seems that working relationships are essential to the food-vending business, most especially because the all-important question of location is left up to the vendors themselves to decide. A city permit lets you set up shop wherever you like. "As long as the street is not restricted you can go anywhere. Anywhere competition allows. Of course, it's going to be a big deal if you go next to a coffee guy and start selling coffee, but vendors have to work it out among themselves."

I asked her to describe some of the typical conflicts between vendors. "Let's say there's a peanut guy, and in the summer he starts selling ice water from a cooler. Then maybe the shish kebab guy on the corner is upset because it's cutting into his business. Or there's a coffee guy and he's supposed to leave at 11:30. If he stays a little bit longer, then the hotdog guy who works the afternoon will be annoyed. There are usually rules about this, but they're unwritten rules. Somehow the system regulates itself. I used to get involved, but I don't have time for that anymore."

Instead Tsatsaronis spends most of her time fighting violations issued by the city. "The most common violation is being in a crosswalk. Everybody wants to be closer to the corner than the guy across the street, because that's what makes them visible." Fines range from $25 to $250, depending on priors. In addition to crosswalk regulations there are myriad food safety requirements to be observed. Contesting a violation is much like contesting a parking ticket. "Tickets can be thrown out because of technicalities, because a mistake was made. Or, believe it or not, there are some tickets that just don't make sense."

Tsatsaronis said she approves of the city's regulations, but she is troubled by the sporadic nature of enforcement. "It's very harsh on vendors now. Let's say there are 10 rules, but only two of them used to be enforced. Now everything is enforced, and it brings a new reality to food vending." The result is confusion, and vendors don't always know how to demonstrate that they're in compliance. "So the vendor comes to us. If he presents a good case, then we'll go to court and share that with the judge."

Tsatsaronis is not a lawyer, nor has she ever worked as a food vendor, but she grew up with the business. Her father was a Greek immigrant who sold shish kebab and hotdogs for 30 years. She said the hotdog business was typical of Greeks. "Bangladeshi with fruit. Afghani and Russians with coffee. In shish kebab and hotdogs the dominant groups are Arabs and Greeks. It seems like they all have their specialty."

Tsatsaronis says the most profitable sort of cart is probably coffee. "Coffee is very inexpensive, and you have a good rate of return. Also, all the others types, whenever you cook food you have a loss, because at the end of the day if the food is not in really good condition, you're gonna have to throw it out."