Whipped Cream Difficulties

And other things, at least in NYC. Have you ever wondered about those pushcarts?

The guy who owns the cart at the entrance to the Central Park Zoo (“Fifth Avenue and East 62nd Street”) pays $289,500 a year to the city parks department.

The zoo entrance drew the highest bid among the 150 pushcart sites in public parks, but the operators of four other carts in and around Central Park also pay the city more than $200,000 a year each. In fact, the 20 highest license fees, each exceeding $100,000, are all for Central Park carts.

Can you make money doing this? Apparently so: “…while vendors are adamant about not divulging details about what they make, most pushcart sites presumably turn a profit or they would not attract such high bids.”

More:

A decade ago, the fee paid for the pushcart at the Central Park Zoo entrance was $120,000, less than half what Mr. Mastafa paid most recently. The second most expensive cart is on the West Drive at West 67th Street near Tavern on the Green, where the fee is $266,850.
For many other parks, especially those in parks outside Manhattan, the fees are much lower — $14,000 in Astoria Park in Queens, $3,200 in Maria Hernandez Park in Brooklyn and $1,100 in Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx. The lowest fee, $700, is paid by the owner of a pushcart near the soccer fields in Inwood Hill Park in Upper Manhattan.

The biggest selling item? Apparently, $3 bottled water. That sounds surprisingly reasonable for NYC, but:

Maximum prices for snacks and beverages are set by the department.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 5th, 2013 at 6:44 am and is filed under Clippings, Economics, Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.