Shane Stephenson’s Speedy Dogs has begun selling hot dogs from a family-made cart 11 a.m.-2 p.m. weekdays on Walnut Street in front of the Patterson Building.

Speedy Dogs sets up not far from where Mark Carter operated the Carter’s Nearly World-Famous Hot Dogs cart for more than a decade on the Delaware County Building Plaza.

“We just started last week, but it’s picking up well,” Stephenson said. “We’ve been selling 40 to 60 hot dogs a day, which is pretty good for starting out.”

Speedy Dogs fills a downtown niche left empty in recent years while Carter, who next month marks 18 years selling hot dogs and sausages from a food cart, has concentrated on late-night sales outside campus-area bars near Ball State University as well as a storefront inside Muncie Mall.

“The reason I quit going downtown, I was doing so much else, I couldn’t keep a set schedule,” Carter said. “That’s not good for business.”

Stephenson is a roofer by trade who was worried about the wear and tear the job puts on his knees and back. His worries prompted him to try a new career.

“My soon-to-be father-in-law is in the same trade and he can’t play with his grandkids,” Stephenson said. “I’m trying to avoid that.”

Stephenson made his Speedy Dogs cart at Hite Welding, a local shop owned by his father, Dave Hite.

Speedy Dogs sells hot dogs, chili cheese dogs, sausages with grilled onions and peppers and a few other variations.

“We’re getting everything from Munsee Meats, so we’re trying to keep everything local,” he said.

“I’ve had several people tell me it’s about time people did street vending,” Stephenson said. “Especially with the way gas prices are. A lot of people work downtown.”

Carter stopped selling hot dogs downtown five years ago. He caters to the late-night hot dog appetites of Ball State students and opened his mall store last fall.

“The mall’s been pretty good,” Carter said. “We’re hitting the numbers I thought we needed to hit. We signed a year’s lease, so we’re here at least until December.”

Speedy Dogs isn’t the first hot dog cart to follow Carter into business.

“In the time I’ve been doing it, there’s been four or five others that have done the same thing,” he said.

Why doesn’t Muncie have more food carts?

“There’s only so many places in Muncie where you can be effective,” Carter said. “You can’t set up at the scramble light at Ball State because they have so many rules and regulations and kids have meal cards.

“It doesn’t surprise me that there aren’t that many. Muncie’s not Indianapolis or Fort Wayne or Evansville. And it takes a lot more effort than people realize to do that every day.”

Stephenson has distributed fliers at downtown businesses, letting potential customers know about Speedy Dog.

“If we get business going good, we may do delivery,” Stephenson said.

But selling food out of carts has always presented a problem. In principle, mobility ought to be a business advantage, but it’s hard to sell food unless people know where you’re going to be. Twitter, which lets you follow your favorite trucks so they can inform you when they’ll be in your neighborhood, is the ideal solution. So it’s not surprising that upscale trucks have been booming recently, earning plaudits and even their own Food Network show.

The result is a win for entrepreneurs, but a headache for incumbent restaurateurs. There are only so many meals in the day, so proprietors of fixed-location food service establishments worry that every lobster roll that’s handed over from a truck is $18 lost from their own kitchen. In an ideal world, this would trigger a frenzy of competition, as restaurants with walls and chairs scramble to prove that they’re offering a premium service in exchange for their higher fixed costs. In reality, it has sparked a frenzy of lobbying.

In California, for example, Assemblyman Bill Monning has introduced a bill that would ban food trucks from operating within 1,500 feet of a school-roughly a three-block radius.

Ostensibly Monning’s policy goal is to dissuade kids from eating at food trucks rather than at their school cafeteria. Curiously, however, his rule applies exclusively to trucks and not to, say, Burger King. What threat pizza poses to children when served from a truck rather than from behind a counter is difficult for me to say. By contrast, the peril to existing restaurants from a sudden proliferation of nimble, low-cost trucks is clear. San Francisco Supervisor Scott Weiner told the San Francisco Weekly that, as written, the rule would ban trucks from the majority of the city. It would be nice to write this off as perhaps just another instance of America’s spasmodic overprotection of children, but it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the people really being protected here are the restaurant owners. After all, elementary schools generally don’t even let kids leave the school building for lunch at all. Banning trucks from operating nearby looks a lot like a pretext to shut them down.

A recent report on street vending for the Institute of Justice emphasizes that many anti-truck politicians don’t even bother with Monning’s pretext. An existing provision of the San Francisco municipal code, for example, states that any business may comment on an application for a new vending license and directs the city to “consider” whether the proposed operation is located within 300 feet of a business that sells the same type of food or merchandise. It would be as if Slate were allowed to complain that it should be illegal to launch a new website to compete with our offerings, and that government should take our complaint seriously.

San Francisco’s rule affects only the same kind of food, so if you’re selling pizza I can try to offer tacos. Across the bay in Oakland, a “vehicular food vendor” is enjoined from locating within 200 feet of any restaurant or deli. Chicago’s rule is like Oakland’s, while in Atlanta there’s a 1,500-foot exclusion zone in which a vendor cannot offer a similar product. These are just the most blatant forms of protectionism. San Jose’s law requiring a mobile vendor to stay at one location (or within 500 feet of that location) for no more than 15 minutes within any two hour period seems clearly designed to make truck-based businesses impractical.

It’s difficult to know precisely where the line should be drawn. The food service industry is generally heavily regulated for safety purposes, and trucks should be no exception to that. And food sales are intimately related to parking, a fraught and much-regulated activity all its own.

But a basic rule of thumb seems to suggest itself: The fact that business owners would prefer not to face competition is not a valid regulatory purpose. A food truck is a kitchen and a vehicle and should need to follow the rules that generally apply to both things. But there’s no need for extra regulatory burdens over and above those. If you’re allowed to have a restaurant two blocks away from a school, there’s no reason to ban a food truck. If you’re allowed to park a van in a space somewhere, there’s no reason to ban parking a van that also happens to sell food.

Most of all, the fact that an existing business owner objects to the practices of a new business is a terrible reason to block a truck from operating. Space is scarce and rents are high in the centers of major American cities. If new competition can bring prices down, we’ll all be better off in the long run. Meanwhile purveyors of traditional restaurants will be challenged to deploy their unique assets-tables, chairs, a roof, walls-in ways that provide meaningful value to customers. Municipal authorities need to learn to welcome the explosion of innovation happening around them and stop trying to choke it off.

Ever wonder where those high-end food trucks come from?

A recent MBA graduate shows up with a graphic designer, a “vintage” (second-hand) food truck, and a passionately calculated business strategy, according to Bruce Weinreb at Worksman Cycles.

Weinreb told Nicola Twilley of Edible Geography that Worksman Cycles is moving away from the low-margin hot-dog cart circuit. With invoices for $40,000 to $100,000 for food truck retrofits, this classically American manufacturer might forget it’s slow uptake on the cycle rickshaw market in New York City.

Twilley toured the historic factory, pointing out that these high-end food trucks appear in a long lineage of iconic all-American food carts, including the Good Humor ice cream tricycle and the New York City hot dog cart.

It’s amazing to trace back New York City’s fleet of shiny steel food carts to this blue-lit, family-run, slightly ramshackle factory in Queens – a vital node in the peripheral, static infrastructure that enable the city’s mobile economy to function.

For generations of immigrants to the U.S., food carts became the first micro-entrepreneurial step toward the “american dream”. Both Goldman Sachs of Sachs Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale’s rose up from the street vending business.

Worksman continues to shape the visual and edible landscape of U.S. streets – and each product is made to order with almost no automation.

Founder Morris Worksman had a dream to clean New York streets of the 2.5 million pounds of horse manure produced, per day, in 1900. It appears the dream paid off.

The hustle begins each day at sundown: “Computadoras!” “Bicicletas!” “Carne asada!” For eight straight blocks along 6th Street in the Westlake neighborhood near downtown, sidewalks are so crowded with vendors and their wares that shoppers barely fit. Cumbia music booms and everything is sold “cheap, cheap, cheap.”

It is a peddler’s paradise – one that the city plans to begin replacing with its own licensed marketplace. The ArtGricultural Market, a cross between a swap meet and farmer’s market, will open Saturday morning just a few blocks south of 6th Street, hoping to persuade merchants to legalize their hawking. Already, more than 80 have signed up. But in an area where life seems to revolve around illegal street vending, organizers know change will not come easily.

Authorities have spent the last three months promoting the effort. Vendors, mostly illegal immigrants, were suspicious. They had to apply for a series of permits. To sell used goods (about 90% do) they had to be fingerprinted, enroll in a class taught by police and pay about $500 in fees. “It’s crazy,” said Carlos Aguilar, who signed up a few weeks ago. “We just want to sell. We don’t have money for permits and rules and fees. We barely make enough to get by.”

But the 300 or so merchants crowding the corridor can’t be ignored, Councilman Ed Reyes said. “We’re giving people an opportunity to move on,” he said. “We don’t want to arrest them, we don’t want to take their goods, but we need them to live under the rules.”

For more than two decades, the vendors’ activities have presented a challenge to city officials

“Street vending, food trucks and farmers’ markets are important components in increasing the District’s quality of life for residents, workers and visitors, and my new regulations are designed to strike a careful balance between encouraging business innovation and respecting our laws as well as brick-and-mortar businesses that have long played according to the rules,” said Mayor Gray. “These proposed regulations eliminate outdated requirements, make it easier for the smallest of entrepreneurs to set up a business here and expand the food options available to consumers.”

Among other improvements, the new regulations would:

Update the outdated “ice-cream-truck rule” that has led to food trucks being cited and fined for having no customers in line even though they were obeying other laws:

-Trucks preparing and selling food would have to park in a legal spot, pay the meter, and can remain there for as long as allowed by the meter or posted parking rules.

-Trucks selling ice cream and desserts would have to park in a legal spot, pay the meter, and can remain there for as long as they have a line of waiting customers or for no more than 10 minutes when customers are not waiting.

Allow the permitting of new sidewalk vending locations throughout the District while grandfathering in existing, long-time vendors at their current locations.

Allow the creation of new Vending Development Zones, which would allow local communities to design plans best tailored for their needs that could include sidewalk vendors, food trucks and farmers’ markets.

Update and expand the ability of DCRA to issue citations for violations of the regulations to ensure vendors clean up any litter and maintain all required health and business licenses.

Clarify street-photography provisions around street vendors to make clear they are not applicable to journalists or photography enthusiasts.

“Street vending plays an important role in maintaining vibrant and active public spaces, as well as allowing entrepreneurs to start a new business,” said DCRA Director Nicholas Majett. “Many of today’s street-vending entrepreneurs will become tomorrow’s bricks-and-mortar entrepreneurs.”

Lawyers from the Street Vendor Project, a advocacy group that fights for the rights of street vendors, slapped Lone Star bar owner Tony Gentile and Brooklyn Bagels Cafe co-owner Mike Boutross with cease-and-desist letters last week, demanding that the duo stop harassing the purveyor of gyros and sodas.

“They placed benches in the spot illegally and they’ve been harassing them through lots of different ways, through the media, and in person by blocking the cart,” said Sean Basinski, a spokesman for the Street Vendor Project.

But Gentile and Boutross denied that they moved the benches, and Boutross added that he had no intention to listen to the request because he hadn’t done anything wrong. He also claimed he threw the note in the trash upon receiving it.

“That guy’s lying through his teeth,” Boutrouss said. “Maybe he doesn’t know who I am or what I look like, and he has me confused with someone else.”

Still, Boutrouss was quick to criticize the cart, claiming that Kassen doesn’t have to pay rent or utilities as brick and mortar merchants do.

“It’s not right that I’m paying $5,000 a month in rent, and this guy is there in the hottest spot in Brooklyn with a permit he pays for once a year,” said Boutross.

Some claim that neighborhood merchants are against the food cart because its run by Middle Easterners, but Boutrouss, who is Lebanese, say his hatred toward Kassen’s rolling kitchen is purely business, not personal.

“You aren’t going to hear me saying ‘those filthy Arabs,’” he said. “I’m a filthy Arab! It’s not about that. It’s about fair competition,”

Gentile has been accused of trying to physically block the cart from parking on Fifth Avenue on March 24 – getting hurt in the process – and took steps to install flower boxes on Kassen’s usual hang out spot.

Yet no one knows who put in the benches, which sprouted up on Fifth Avenue overnight on March 22. Merchants say that one of the benches was uprooted from Fifth Avenue and 87th Street and moved to Middle Eastern Halal Cart’s usual spot.

Kassen said he’s seen both Gentile and Boutross lurking around the cart with tape measures and believes the two men are plotting against him.

“I’m 100 percent sure they’re in it together,” said Kassen. “I’ve seen them together, measuring the spot.”

Basinski said he wants to meet with Boutross in person to alleviate the bagel shop owner’s concerns.

“We’d like to explain to him the cart is not a threat to him,” said Basinski, citing studies that say mobile vendors do not harm from brick-and-mortar businesses. “They’re half a block away, on the other side of the street, selling a completely different product.”

I will be able to start looking for weekend yoga teaching positions once our second son will be a couple of months old, however in the meantime and also thereafter, I would love a work from home position that I could create my own hours for.

I am just at a loss for what is real out there and where to find these types of positions. I thought originally that some type of data entry would be perfect as I would be able to do the work at night when the kids are sleeping o during nap times etc. However, it seems from some online researching, that data entry jobs are just not out there.

Looking for Great Deals?

I’ve also stumbled upon some info on medical billing or transcribing? This seems appealing to me again because of the hours I could create on my own time.

And I am sure there are so many other types of jobs out there that I have never even heard of…

I just feel very lost in terms of where to find work, what type of work to be doing etc. Could someone please point me in the right legit;) direction?

Thank you!

Each country not only shows you the typical foods you might eat at a street vendor, it also shows you how the people in each area dress and what the cities look like. There are even many close ups that show you how the foods are prepared. Each photograph has a caption so that you know exactly what you’re looking at. Each area of the world contains several recipes for foods typically sold as street food. The book explains the origins of the recipe and has a beautiful color photograph showing what it looks like as it is traditionally prepared. The included recipes are amazing. They have a detailed ingredients list and easy to follow instructions along with a brief history of the recipe itself. For the most part, the ingredients should be available at any large supermarket however in some cases, you may need to search out an ethic store to find all the ingredients necessary. There is a nice range of sweet and savory foods in the cookbook.

Whether you love to cook or to travel, you’ll enjoy this cookbook/travel book immensely. I may never have the chance to travel to any of the countries but the photographs and descriptions included let me feel as though I had. I highly recommend this for the chef or avid traveler on your Christmas list.

And at least one industry rep is giving the idea high marks.

“Most mobile food vendors want letter grades, just like restaurants receive,” Sean Basinski, director of the Street Vendor Project of the Urban Justice Center, said in a statement Sunday. “The vast majority of them sell clean, delicious food — and they want to be recognized for that.”

The group represents more than 1,200 street vendors. Its support of the system comes after state Sen. Jose Peralta (D-Queens) told The New York Post he will introduce a measure this week requiring hot dog vendors and the like to post grades after getting inspected.

Fines would start at $50 for street meat peddlers who fail to post their grades, The Post reported recently.

In August, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he supported giving vendors grades.

But now he says his business is about to suffer a severe cutback thanks to a new city ordinance that will force the cart to close and miss the late night barflies.

Looking for Great Deals?

Street vendor Mike Hernadez runs the “Easy Weenies” hot dog cart on Fourth Street in Bethlehem, near Lehigh University. He’s allowed to operate until 4 a.m. all week.

But Bethlehem City Council is considering an ordinance that would force him to close at six Sunday through Wednesday.

Hernadez says limiting his hours will cut into his profits.