A Surcharge On Hot Air

Yada yada yada:

The latest sign of the rising cost of everything greets shoppers at the registers of Eli’s fine-food warehouse on the Upper East Side like a slap with a wet fish.

“Attention customers,” the sign reads. “An energy surcharge of 1.8 percent will be added to every purchase.”

Look down at the receipt and sure enough, there it is, right below the totaled items: another add-on that yanks the price of an $8.99 pound of fresh figs to $9.15.

. . .

[Eli] Zabar, whose greenness quotient is such that he uses the excess heat from his bakery a few blocks away to warm his rooftop greenhouses, said that joking was the last thing on his mind.

“I could have easily just raised prices in the store — which we do all the time anyway,” he said.

“But I’m making a statement here. This is to make my customers aware of the differences of running a food business, as opposed to any other kind of business. The infrastructure that powers a supermarket is huge — the perishability, yada yada yada. The ice that keeps the fish fresh. It takes a lot of energy to roast coffee.”

AM New York Is Ruining Our Children

Not only do they start track fires and precipitate floods but they also are creating a dangerous moral hazard for our youth.

Runnin’ With The Devil

I found the simple life ain’t so simple:

The hours for Ikea’s free shuttle bus and water taxi will be reduced because of a drop in customers, said officials for the Swedish home furnishing giant.

Beginning Oct. 1, the buses and boats will cruise between downtown Brooklyn, Park Slope and Ikea later in the day and less frequently, officials said.

“After Labor Day, it [use of the service] kind of tapered off in the morning,” said spokesman Joseph Roth.

“We’re trying to make sure the service can be provided when needed, but we may find the winter is different than fall so we could adjust it again.”

The service, which began when Ikea opened in June, has drawn gaggles of commuters eager to take advantage of a free ride — many with no intention of visiting the store.

. . .

The slashed hours didn’t go over well with commuters or shoppers.

“I [am] . . . angry . . . they cut the hours for the bus,” said Nicky Jackson, 20, who uses the Ikea service to commute from her Red Hook home.

“It’s way better than the city bus.”

For Marquice Jenkins, the abbreviated bus schedule isn’t just an inconvenience — it’s a threat to his punctuality.

“You’ll probably be late to wherever you have to go,” said Jenkins, 20, a student who lives in Red Hook and rides the bus twice a week.

“It’s free, so you can’t really complain.”

80s Redux

On the one hand you have a worldwide financial meltdown followed by perhaps the greatest structural changes to the economy since the 1930s. On the other hand you have a dirtier Bowery. And that’s something all of us understand:

Lizzy Goodman was one of the fortunate ones of the class of 2002; upon graduating from Penn, she had a job lined up as an assistant teacher at Buckley, the all-boys school on the Upper East Side. Six years later, she’s an editor at large at Blender. Like some of her peers, she seems hopeful that, instead of being a harbinger of utter doom, this crash will instead level the playing field just a little bit.

“I don’t think anyone is hoping for American financial collapse just so that the Bowery can be seedy again,” said Ms. Goodman, who lives in the West Village. “But on the other hand, if in the wake of this collective shuttering and fearing comes a return to old school ’80s boho New York, I would certainly be in favor of that.”

Fortunately for her, there are literally hundreds of us who consider our subscription to Blender to be utterly indispensible.

Go Figure

Figures:

Efforts by the Bloomberg administration to add accountability to the public school system have included moving quickly to shut down schools deemed beyond repair, and rewarding those that make significant progress on standardized tests. Those initiatives seemed to collide last week, when teachers and principals at five of the failed schools earned cash bonuses for their successes.

The Department of Education explained the apparent contradiction in its judgments largely as a question of short-term versus long-term goals. Students at the five schools — four of which closed last spring, the fifth scheduled to close in 2010 — consistently lagged far behind their peers citywide on state math and reading tests, often with less than 20 percent meeting state standards. But during the 2007-8 school year, each of the schools met the improvement targets set by the Education Department on their report cards, making them eligible for performance bonuses of about $3,000 per teacher and $7,000 for principals.