Leading Economic Indicators: The Hot Dog Vendor Bump

Like a Brooklyn-Queens real estate spike that indicates people are cutting back, the hot dog vendor bump may be short-lived, and portend worse things to come:

The sinking economy has taken a big bite out of the borough’s top-grossing hot dog carts — which are now struggling to lure enough customers to pay their sky-high rents.

Vendor Timothaos Ayad, who pays the borough’s top-dog price of $48,000 a year in rent to the city to set up his cart outside Brooklyn Supreme Court, said business is down nearly 50% since August.

“I hope I will break even,” said Ayad, 46, a father of three, who has had the pricey contract for more than two years.

Ayad, who peddles $1.75 hot dogs and $5 gyros to the throngs of court workers, jurors and others passing through the bustling downtown Brooklyn spot, said he has been hurt by the fact that so many people now bring their lunches from home as a way to save money.

“In the morning, I see everybody coming by with their bag of lunch,” he said, adding he has decided to throw in the towel and not bid on the spot when it is up again at the end of the year.

“The job is too tiring and the economy is bad, so it’s not worth it anymore,” he said, adding he has to finish out his contract or lose his hefty deposit.

Maybe We Can Have Another Strike About It, Which Would Be A Kick, Lots Of Fun, A Hoot

When the head of the MTA overturns term limits and spends $100 million to run for mayor, then we can talk about “fairness”, but until then, it just doesn’t seem like the same situation:

The MTA cash crunch — already blasting straphangers with planned fare hikes and service cuts — may put the squeeze on transit workers next, experts said.

Bus and subway workers face three grim possibilities: no raise this year, a one-time payment that doesn’t carry over into next year or a pay hike of approximately 1.5% or less, experts said.

. . .

Union leader Roger Toussaint issued a terse statement last night through a spokesman: “There’s no getting around the fairness issue.”

Toussaint suggested it would be unfair if transit workers didn’t get raises similar to those doled out by the Bloomberg administration last year to various unions.

Police officers, firefighters, sanitation workers, correction officers and clerical workers got annual raises of about 4%.

On The Bright Side, We Just Saved The Earth!

And all those empty storefronts mean less strain on the electrical grid:

University-run newspaper NYU Today recently announced that it will discontinue its print edition.

“Going online will allow us to be more current, reduce administrative spending, and expand the resources we offer,” editor Jason Hollander said. “But one of the biggest benefits will be the more than two million pages of tabloid paper that will be saved each year, and the emissions from the production and delivery process that will be eliminated.”

The paper is run and distributed 12 times per academic year by the Office of Public Affairs. Its mission, according to the website, is to cover “dynamic research, scholarly pursuits and community activity of the university’s faculty, staff, students and alumni.”

The paper will offer expanded online content in the fall to make up for the loss of the print edition.

The City That Never Sleeps Will No Longer Be Able To Buy Those Annoying One- And Two-Cent Stamps To Keep Up With The Postal Service’s Frequent Rate Increases

That said, the 24-hour window was beginning to attract the wrong kind of crowd:

The James A. Farley Post Office across from Penn Station will close its 24-hour windows to save money, starting May 9.

“That’s horrible,” said Jeff Garret, 25, a custodian from Manhattan. “When you need to get your mail off, you need to get it off.”

Location Scout: James A. Farley Post Office.

Another Answer To The Eternal Mystery Of How Young Hipsters Afford To Live The Lifestyle They Live In New York City

They grift! Or as Kari Ferrell might explain it had you run into her, “I want you to throw a hot dog down my hall”:

It’s likely that when Kari Ferrell walked into the Vice magazine offices in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, last month to interview for an administrative assistant job, they thought they’d hit the jackpot. Ms. Ferrell — petite, 22 years old, of Korean heritage — had a huge tattoo of a dragon across her chest and a cute pixie haircut. She was talkative, funny, charming, adorable. She had a tattoo on her back that read “I Love Beards.” She told them she’d been working for the New York office of the concert promotion company GoldenVoice, which puts on huge rock festivals like Coachella near Palm Springs, Calif., and that she’d moved to New York from Utah just a few months earlier. They hired her on the spot.

A few days later, one of Ms. Ferrell’s new colleagues came by her desk. “I said, ‘Excuse me, miss, is [her boss] downstairs?'” the 29-year-old told The Observer. “She thought that was very polite that I said, ‘Excuse me, miss,’ and after that she started talking to me, instant-messaging me. She asked if I was from the South. I told her no. It escalated from there.”

Within the space of a half-hour, Ms. Ferrell was peppering him with questions about his sexual history — how many women he’d slept with and so on. “She was coming on to me, and I was super into it for the first part of it,” he said. “I realized I could have fun after work — but then I was like, ‘Let me check this girl out.'” He Googled her. Up popped a photo of his flirtatious new co-worker on the Salt Lake City Police Department’s Most Wanted list, wanted on five different warrants, including passing $60,000 in bad checks, forgery and retail theft.