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VIDEOBehold: The Great American Wiener
By
Scott Reeves Apr 09, 2009 12:55 pm
The iconic hot-dog cart goes national.
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It’s the type of story the Journal does exceedingly well: An oddball hook to draw the reader into the larger issue - how some people cope with the downbeat economy.
The story makes the arrival of tube steaks in a small Texas town sound romantic, and fact-filled, too. “Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, Americans typically consume 7 billion hot dogs, according to the American Meat Institute’s National Hot Dog & Sausage Council,” the Bible of Wall Street reports. That can mean anything from the iconic Oscar Mayer (KFT) to an all-kosher Hebrew National (CAG) to your basic nameless cylinder of processed parts.
In New York, many vendors store their carts in the West 40s. Hell’s Kitchen, the former Irish neighborhood, is gentrifying, but many of the warehouses along what was once a working waterfront haven’t yet been turned into lofts and are used as stables for the horses that pull carriages through Central Park - and to store wheeled hot dog stands overnight.
Early on summer mornings, you can see the vendors pushing their carts up Ninth Avenue to Columbus Circle and Central Park. During the summer, there are almost as many hot dog vendors in the park as beat-up, dented squirrels that look like they survived the trenches of World War I.
Keep in mind that Manhattan is an old Indian word that’s often translated as “island of many hills.” These hills, especially the grade on Ninth Avenue leading to Central Park, drive hot-dog vendors nuts.
It’s no easy task pushing a fully loaded cart up the hill, especially when the temperature is already above 90 degrees and the humidity feels like it was imported from the Amazon. One morning, an entrepreneur buried a wheel in one of New York’s famous potholes and his cart tipped over, fanning hot dogs across Ninth Avenue like a deck of cards.
No positions in stocks mentioned.
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