vendors do not compete with brick-and-mortars
TRANSCRIPT
The Daily News recently ran an editorial calling for
research on whether fruit and vegetable vendors are
unfairly competing with brick-and-mortar small
business owners. The Korean Small Business Service
Center, which represents many green grocers, claims
that the Green Cart vendors are driving them out of
business.
We welcome further research, but it is not necessary.
A whole series of scholarly studies has already
documented that street vendors do not compete with
brick-and-mortar establishments. In fact, they help
their businesses.
In New York, Professor John Gaber conducted nine
months of field research on 14th Street during the
early 1990’s.1 He found that the goods sold on the
sidewalk (t-shirts, watches, socks, etc.) were different
from the higher-end and bigger-ticket items sold in
stores (stereos, furniture, etc.) The “vendors
complement the existing array of affordable goods
retailed by store owners with smaller and usually
very inexpensive items (i.e., 3 pairs of socks for $1).”
Beyond a mere lack of harm, Gaber discovered a
“positive synergistic relationship” between the
vendors and their brick-and mortar counterparts. He
found that the vendors drew people to the area and
encouraged them to spend more time there, which
translated into more business for all. For example, he
saw that vendors provide food to hungry shoppers,
enabling them to continue shopping for longer.
Nearly identical results were found in Los Angeles.
Studying vendors in the MacArthur Park area,
Professor Gregg Kettles discovered that there was
little head-to-head competition between vendors and
storefront merchants.2 “Sidewalk vendors avoid
selling from places adjacent to merchants selling the
same product or products,” he found. Indeed, he
observed that the vendors tried to be “good
neighbors” to nearby merchants, by, for example,
sweeping the street near their places of business.
In Chicago, Professors Morales, Balkin and Persky
undertook an economic study of the famous open-air
street market on Maxwell Street, which closed in
1994 before being reopened, later, in a smaller form.3
Combining ethnographic and economic analysis
methods, the professors estimated a $49.3 million
economic loss as a result of the market’s closure.
Many retails shops had gone out of business since the
closing of the market, they observed. Additionally,
with the vendors gone, many wholesale distributors
who supplied them also had to close their doors.
Throughout history, the removal of vendors has led to
a loss of foot traffic that harms brick-and-mortar
small businesses. As Suzanne Wasserman
documented, merchants on Manhattan’s Lower East
Side banded together in 1929 to lobby against street
vendors.4 By 1940, however, “the East Side business
community, which had fought for ten years to remove
the embarrassing pushcarts, now complained that
their removal irreparably damaged their trade.” The
stores, who saw their sales drop as much as 60
percent, “had severely miscalculated the extent to
which their business depended upon that of the
pushcarts outside their doors,” wrote Wasserman.
More recently, City Limits magazine documented the
complaints of brick-and-mortar merchants on Fulton
Street, in Brooklyn, after the street vendors there
were removed in 2001.5 In addition to drawing
customers, and contributing to a vibrant street life,
the vendors served a public safety function. “If
somebody was in trouble, they’d be the first ones
there – even before the cops,” said one merchant,
complaining about the loss of the vendors.
1. Manhattan’s 14th Street Vendors’ Market: Informal Street Peddlers’ Complementary Relationship with New York City’s Economy, John Gaber, Urban Anthropology, Winter 1994. 2. Legal Responses to Sidewalk Vending: The case of Los Angeles, California, Gregg W. Kettles, in Street Entrepreneurs, edited by John Cross and Alfonso Morales, May 2007. 3. The Value of Benefits of Public Street Market: the Case of Maxwell Street, Alfonso Morales, Steven Balkin, Joseph Persky, Economic Development Quarterly, November 1995. 4. The Good Old Days of Poverty: The Battle Over the Fate of New York City’s Lower East Side During the Depression, Suzanne Wasserman (New York University, Department of History: Ph.D. Dissertation, 1990). 5. Sold Out: What happens to the neighborhood when vendors disappear?, Hilary Russ, City Limits Magazine, September 2002.
Studies: Street vendors do not compete
with brick-and-mortar merchants