While food trucks are relatively new, midtown has long been home to many thriving food carts. Well, the face of mobile vending might come full circle, if Wafels & Dinges’s strategy for coping with food-truck crackdowns is picked up by others: Rather than fight for parking, the stroopwafel purveyor started selling its wares from a cart, as DNA Info reports. The outlay isn’t cheap: $15,000 to $20,000 per cart, and the space vendors have to work with is smaller, but it could be worth it in the face of lost business and police fines.
In other means of coping, some trucks, including Schnitzel & Things, have stopped updating Twitter with their daily whereabouts. And others are simply despairing: Treats Truck owner Kim Ima is still mourning the loss of her midtown following. She recounts circling for three hours recently without finding a spot and says she’s leaving the neighborhood after four years. Meanwhile, the crackdowns are spawning food-truck activists, some of whom have started a Facebook page; if you want to “Tell Mayor Bloomberg to Stop Harassing Food Trucks,” you can “like” that here.
Food Trucks Shifting Strategies As Police Crackdown Continues [DNA Info]
Earlier: More Food-Truck Crackdowns in Midtown
Food-Truck Battle Goes Crosstown
As Food Trucks Irk the Upper West Side, Is Their Era On the Wane?
