8 ms·

Inside D.C.'s Food-Truck Wars

edge17 16y ago
This sounds like DC. I remember when they used to have vendors all over the national mall. Then the turf battles started, and a few homicides later it became illegal to set up a table to sell souvenirs. I think even the street performers need to have permits if they intend to play a trumpet or something on the street in DC.
AaronM 16y ago
The way i see it, is that this is just capitalism. If you sell a overpriced poor product, and someone comes in and sells a better product, your going to lose. Of course people don't like to lose, so they try to get government to prevent the new comers from getting a foothold on their market.
- tptacek 16y ago
  It's not just capitalism. The streets are community property. Starbucks can't exploit that to set up coffee trucks selling below-cost lattes to siphon customers from Intelligentsia and then call it "capitalism"; Intelligentsia paid for a very expensive retail space, and Starbucks would be free-riding off our tax dollars to punish them for it.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    How is a food truck free-riding any more than a person parking a car is? Unlike a car parker, the food truck owner is also paying licensing fees to the city. If you believe people underpay for parking, I agree with you. Everyone who parks a car is free-riding, and food-trucks are free-riding to the exact same extent as a guy who commutes to work. But if that's the problem, why not just charge market rates for parking?
    - marcinw 16y ago
      I live in NYC, and I see food trucks everywhere. Someone parking their car versus a food truck doesn't even compare. Like Thomas, I enjoy food trucks, but I wouldn't want them being able to just park anywhere. Food trucks attract many people, and thus result in more litter, noise, beggers etc; that's something I just don't want at my doorstep everyday.
      - ultrasaurus 16y ago
        I think everyone can agree (relentless optimism ensues) that we hope the licensing costs cover the externalites (parking, waste clean up), which mitigates that to some extent. That still leaves property values as an issue.
      - yummyfajitas 16y ago
        I'm not opposed to regulating food trucks for crowd control reasons. Nor would I object to charging them license fees proportional to their impact (e.g., cost of additional litter cleanup) - in fact, I'd strongly support that. But that's not tptacek's objection - his objection is that many people will prefer Starbucks Truck to Intelligentsia, which might cause Intelligentsia to go out of business. This would deprive him of the coffee he desires, and he is willing to deprive everyone else of the coffee they desire to protect his preferred coffee.
        tptacek 16y ago
        Honestly, I don't care; I go to Starbucks 40% of the time and Intelligentsia 60% of the time (Intelligentsia is on the first floor of my business). The reason I brought up Starbucks was to take the "underdog vs. establishment" subtext out of the discussion, because it isn't relevant, but was essentially the theme of the article we're commenting on.
    - tptacek 16y ago
      If you believe the city shouldn't zone space for commercial vs. residential use, I agree with you. Otherwise, in for a penny, in for a pound: the state has created (for good reasons or bad) an artificial scarcity in retail space, and people who exploit public property to skirt the resulting premium are, in fact, free-riders.
  - AaronM 16y ago
    Why can't Starbucks do exactly what you are saying they can't do? It wouldn't be illegal for Starbucks to operator a mobile coffee truck, and if they sell below cost drinks to and take customers away from someone else at a loss then that would be between Starbucks and their shareholders. And how would they be free-riding off our tax dollars? If that is the root cause here, then maybe the food truck owners should pay more taxes, which I doubt that it is. Any established industry has a vested interest in keeping status quo. They don't want someone to come in and shake things up, because that means they might have to actually compete.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
    - tptacek 16y ago
      Yes, it's unfair to other coffee shops to have to compete with a truck that offers a similar product with an artificially (state-sponsored!) reduction in cost structure. Cities are zoned for retail business. That zoning is part of what determines the cost of commercial real estate. Why is it fair for the city to "look the other way" when people set up transient businesses that cannibalize businesses that invest in their community? That's a de facto subsidy, not the free market.
tptacek 16y ago
Food trucks are one of the breaking trends in urban food scenes. Austin is apparently famous for them, but every major metro area has a bunch of them now. For the uninitiated, these are high-end restaurant operations, in "sandwich shop" configurations, hosted in trucks. They aren't hot dog carts; we're talking about foie gras and duck confit flatbreads here. There's an obvious legitimate concern here, and it may help if you switch the role of the underdog and the establishment to understand it. If guerilla chefs can set up trucks, so can Starbucks[1]. How would we feel about Starbucks launching a fleet of cafe trucks and parking them right near independent coffee houses? It's these kinds of tensions between the local optima that the market seeks and the long-term welfare of communities that makes me not a libertarian. The food trucks are awesome. I want more of them. But I don't want every neighborhood restaurant in the South Loop replaced by Potbelly's, Jimmy Johns, and Dunkin' Donuts, which is exactly what will happen if food trucks make the margins on brick-and-mortar restaurants untenable for independent operators. Chicago apparently has a provision that allows food trucks only within a certain distance of a brick-and-mortar restaurant. It's a clumsy start. It looks like there's no black-and-white answer... which is why we have a city council, I guess; that, and to prevent us from eating foie gras.[2] [1] When I left Ann Arbor, Zingermans[3] ran a cafe truck out of a strip mall parking lot, and it was spectacularly awesome; I can't wait for the dawn of the cafe trucks in Chicago. [2] Our city council famously banned foie gras, because force-feeding ducks is an outrage, unlike battery farming Purdue chickens. [3] Which is awesome[1], go there, worth a detour to A2.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- oldgregg 16y ago
  Completely disagree. You just assume that corporations are going to be rolling out truck fleets without providing any evidence of the fact. The current reality seems to indicate right the opposite of what you seem to fear. It's independent restaurants that are starting food trucks and it's CORPORATE interests that are colluding with local government to stop the threat -- precisely because they know they CAN'T compete with the decentralized system of street vendors. I've spent a lot of time in China, India and Brazil -- everywhere you go there are street vendors -- all run by small business owners. When McDonald's and KFC go overseas they are usually considered a luxury item. The problem is that corporate food has nothing to do with food. In the gilded age the entire industry has been based on selling "experiences" -- that's how you maximize revenue. But when the economy contracts people suddenly care about the FOOD again -- suddenly people are unwilling to pay an extra $2 for "Starbucks experience." My guess is that this is a long term trend. Here is one thing you CAN be sure of. When a corporation says "jump" the politicians say "how high" -- and right now corporate food wants MORE regulation in order to protect their revenue stream.
allertonm 16y ago
Vancouver has been experimenting with allowing a greater variety of food carts recently. The previous regulations allowed nothing more exotic than a hotdog cart, which led to innovations like Japadog. In the first instance they've picked 17 sites with the explicit purpose of avoiding the kind of conflict described in the article - so they tend to be in front of office buildings etc. The process of handing out licenses for these sites by lottery initially produced some odd results but this seems to be sorting itself out in the wash - and we're starting to see some success stories. It'll be interesting to see how the scheme can be expanded while still avoiding conflict - I think we may have a case of Portland-envy and won't stop until we can say Vancouver's scene is as vibrant as Portland's. The whole area of BIAs and how well they represent the interests of local businesses is somewhat interesting to me right now, as it appears that BIAs are a primary force in opposing any kind of change in the city especially those that affect parking and car usage. Like, for example, better bike lanes.
va_coder 16y ago
This actual could lead to some interesting technical solutions. There are Twitter feeds that help customers find the food trucks, but there's still room for improvement in getting that information to the right people at the right time, easily. As long as people know where they are, the food trucks can park out of the way and still get a lot of customers. If anybody writes an android/iphone app that helps me find trucks with quality food, that are sitting on a side road, I'll use it ;)
- hugh3 16y ago
  Indeed, if you're in an area where food trucks are common, an app providing a real-time look at where all the food trucks are would be a great thing to write. You could also provide reviews, or perhaps charge the food truck operators for promoting their business. I'm sure somebody is already doing this.
  - johnwatson11218 16y ago
    I think that is just the start. Imagine an app that lets groups of office workers put together a large complex order that is already paid for when the trunk leaves the overnight lot. It could start to blur the distinction between food truck and the office catering outfits I have seen. You could go so far as to allow the menu to be customized the night before. Maybe the truck operators could move on a great deal on beef because they have all the orders paid for in advance. Another idea for an app would be a real time inventory that could run against a fleet of trucks so that new inventory could be dispatched to try and catch more of the unexpected lunch rushes.
jswinghammer 16y ago
A few of my coworkers are obsessed with the Clover Food Truck in downtown Boston. It's a very nice place to get food cheaply. One guy goes there pretty much every day at least once and for awhile twice. I think it's a great development to let people who have limited capital get started. It's a nice way to test the market for what you're serving too. I have a few friends who are considering trying to get a food truck business going.

This sounds like DC. I remember when they used to have vendors all over the national mall. Then the turf battles started, and a few homicides later it became illegal to set up a table to sell souvenirs. I think even the street performers need to have permits if they intend to play a trumpet or something on the street in DC.

AaronM 16y ago

The way i see it, is that this is just capitalism. If you sell a overpriced poor product, and someone comes in and sells a better product, your going to lose. Of course people don't like to lose, so they try to get government to prevent the new comers from getting a foothold on their market.

tptacek 16y ago
It's not just capitalism. The streets are community property. Starbucks can't exploit that to set up coffee trucks selling below-cost lattes to siphon customers from Intelligentsia and then call it "capitalism"; Intelligentsia paid for a very expensive retail space, and Starbucks would be free-riding off our tax dollars to punish them for it.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  How is a food truck free-riding any more than a person parking a car is? Unlike a car parker, the food truck owner is also paying licensing fees to the city. If you believe people underpay for parking, I agree with you. Everyone who parks a car is free-riding, and food-trucks are free-riding to the exact same extent as a guy who commutes to work. But if that's the problem, why not just charge market rates for parking?
  - marcinw 16y ago
    I live in NYC, and I see food trucks everywhere. Someone parking their car versus a food truck doesn't even compare. Like Thomas, I enjoy food trucks, but I wouldn't want them being able to just park anywhere. Food trucks attract many people, and thus result in more litter, noise, beggers etc; that's something I just don't want at my doorstep everyday.
    - ultrasaurus 16y ago
      I think everyone can agree (relentless optimism ensues) that we hope the licensing costs cover the externalites (parking, waste clean up), which mitigates that to some extent. That still leaves property values as an issue.
    - yummyfajitas 16y ago
      I'm not opposed to regulating food trucks for crowd control reasons. Nor would I object to charging them license fees proportional to their impact (e.g., cost of additional litter cleanup) - in fact, I'd strongly support that. But that's not tptacek's objection - his objection is that many people will prefer Starbucks Truck to Intelligentsia, which might cause Intelligentsia to go out of business. This would deprive him of the coffee he desires, and he is willing to deprive everyone else of the coffee they desire to protect his preferred coffee.
      - tptacek 16y ago
        Honestly, I don't care; I go to Starbucks 40% of the time and Intelligentsia 60% of the time (Intelligentsia is on the first floor of my business). The reason I brought up Starbucks was to take the "underdog vs. establishment" subtext out of the discussion, because it isn't relevant, but was essentially the theme of the article we're commenting on.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    If you believe the city shouldn't zone space for commercial vs. residential use, I agree with you. Otherwise, in for a penny, in for a pound: the state has created (for good reasons or bad) an artificial scarcity in retail space, and people who exploit public property to skirt the resulting premium are, in fact, free-riders.
- AaronM 16y ago
  Why can't Starbucks do exactly what you are saying they can't do? It wouldn't be illegal for Starbucks to operator a mobile coffee truck, and if they sell below cost drinks to and take customers away from someone else at a loss then that would be between Starbucks and their shareholders. And how would they be free-riding off our tax dollars? If that is the root cause here, then maybe the food truck owners should pay more taxes, which I doubt that it is. Any established industry has a vested interest in keeping status quo. They don't want someone to come in and shake things up, because that means they might have to actually compete.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
  - tptacek 16y ago
    Yes, it's unfair to other coffee shops to have to compete with a truck that offers a similar product with an artificially (state-sponsored!) reduction in cost structure. Cities are zoned for retail business. That zoning is part of what determines the cost of commercial real estate. Why is it fair for the city to "look the other way" when people set up transient businesses that cannibalize businesses that invest in their community? That's a de facto subsidy, not the free market.

tptacek 16y ago

Food trucks are one of the breaking trends in urban food scenes. Austin is apparently famous for them, but every major metro area has a bunch of them now. For the uninitiated, these are high-end restaurant operations, in "sandwich shop" configurations, hosted in trucks. They aren't hot dog carts; we're talking about foie gras and duck confit flatbreads here. There's an obvious legitimate concern here, and it may help if you switch the role of the underdog and the establishment to understand it. If guerilla chefs can set up trucks, so can Starbucks[1]. How would we feel about Starbucks launching a fleet of cafe trucks and parking them right near independent coffee houses? It's these kinds of tensions between the local optima that the market seeks and the long-term welfare of communities that makes me not a libertarian. The food trucks are awesome. I want more of them. But I don't want every neighborhood restaurant in the South Loop replaced by Potbelly's, Jimmy Johns, and Dunkin' Donuts, which is exactly what will happen if food trucks make the margins on brick-and-mortar restaurants untenable for independent operators. Chicago apparently has a provision that allows food trucks only within a certain distance of a brick-and-mortar restaurant. It's a clumsy start. It looks like there's no black-and-white answer... which is why we have a city council, I guess; that, and to prevent us from eating foie gras.[2] [1] When I left Ann Arbor, Zingermans[3] ran a cafe truck out of a strip mall parking lot, and it was spectacularly awesome; I can't wait for the dawn of the cafe trucks in Chicago. [2] Our city council famously banned foie gras, because force-feeding ducks is an outrage, unlike battery farming Purdue chickens. [3] Which is awesome[1], go there, worth a detour to A2.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
oldgregg 16y ago
Completely disagree. You just assume that corporations are going to be rolling out truck fleets without providing any evidence of the fact. The current reality seems to indicate right the opposite of what you seem to fear. It's independent restaurants that are starting food trucks and it's CORPORATE interests that are colluding with local government to stop the threat -- precisely because they know they CAN'T compete with the decentralized system of street vendors. I've spent a lot of time in China, India and Brazil -- everywhere you go there are street vendors -- all run by small business owners. When McDonald's and KFC go overseas they are usually considered a luxury item. The problem is that corporate food has nothing to do with food. In the gilded age the entire industry has been based on selling "experiences" -- that's how you maximize revenue. But when the economy contracts people suddenly care about the FOOD again -- suddenly people are unwilling to pay an extra $2 for "Starbucks experience." My guess is that this is a long term trend. Here is one thing you CAN be sure of. When a corporation says "jump" the politicians say "how high" -- and right now corporate food wants MORE regulation in order to protect their revenue stream.

allertonm 16y ago

Vancouver has been experimenting with allowing a greater variety of food carts recently. The previous regulations allowed nothing more exotic than a hotdog cart, which led to innovations like Japadog. In the first instance they've picked 17 sites with the explicit purpose of avoiding the kind of conflict described in the article - so they tend to be in front of office buildings etc. The process of handing out licenses for these sites by lottery initially produced some odd results but this seems to be sorting itself out in the wash - and we're starting to see some success stories. It'll be interesting to see how the scheme can be expanded while still avoiding conflict - I think we may have a case of Portland-envy and won't stop until we can say Vancouver's scene is as vibrant as Portland's. The whole area of BIAs and how well they represent the interests of local businesses is somewhat interesting to me right now, as it appears that BIAs are a primary force in opposing any kind of change in the city especially those that affect parking and car usage. Like, for example, better bike lanes.

va_coder 16y ago

This actual could lead to some interesting technical solutions. There are Twitter feeds that help customers find the food trucks, but there's still room for improvement in getting that information to the right people at the right time, easily. As long as people know where they are, the food trucks can park out of the way and still get a lot of customers. If anybody writes an android/iphone app that helps me find trucks with quality food, that are sitting on a side road, I'll use it ;)

hugh3 16y ago
Indeed, if you're in an area where food trucks are common, an app providing a real-time look at where all the food trucks are would be a great thing to write. You could also provide reviews, or perhaps charge the food truck operators for promoting their business. I'm sure somebody is already doing this.
- johnwatson11218 16y ago
  I think that is just the start. Imagine an app that lets groups of office workers put together a large complex order that is already paid for when the trunk leaves the overnight lot. It could start to blur the distinction between food truck and the office catering outfits I have seen. You could go so far as to allow the menu to be customized the night before. Maybe the truck operators could move on a great deal on beef because they have all the orders paid for in advance. Another idea for an app would be a real time inventory that could run against a fleet of trucks so that new inventory could be dispatched to try and catch more of the unexpected lunch rushes.

jswinghammer 16y ago

A few of my coworkers are obsessed with the Clover Food Truck in downtown Boston. It's a very nice place to get food cheaply. One guy goes there pretty much every day at least once and for awhile twice. I think it's a great development to let people who have limited capital get started. It's a nice way to test the market for what you're serving too. I have a few friends who are considering trying to get a food truck business going.