Tent canvas with rubberized coating $3k and someone carrying that same bag is upset with buying a $30 hot dog????
Posted on 06/07/2015 11:30:22 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
I’m shocked by one aspect of the story of the guy selling $30 hot dogs to tourists near the World Trade Center — shocked that he was fired. Who knew hot-dog men could be fired?
As for that other detail — selling a hot dog for considerably “more than it’s worth,” so what? Apple makes a huge profit on every device it sells. Does anyone think Apple is guilty of “price gouging”? Moreover, a hot dog is guaranteed not to shatter when it falls on the sidewalk, and I’ve never had to reboot my sauerkraut. No hot dog has ever been rendered obsolete by a new model that has a slightly thinner bun.
Hot-dog guy Ahmed Mohammed — let’s be accurate and call him Hot Dog Hero — was simply exercising his right to sell stuff in the marketplace for whatever he can get for it. Why begrudge him a large markup if he took advantage of the fact that some people are stupid? Taking advantage of stupidity is an important driver of the economic engine. Without taking advantage of stupid people, how would haute-couture designers sell a couple yards of shiny fabric for $2,000? Without taking advantage of stupid people, how would the New York State Lottery rake in $3 billion in profit? Without taking advantage of stupid people, how would the Franklin Mint have sold off millions of dollars worth of plastic copies of Jackie Onassis’ plastic pearls? If the stupidity were ever wrung out of the system, our economy would be the size of Bangladesh’s.
All of these stupid people are exactly what Hot Dog Hero’s “victims” were — willing customers....
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Tent canvas with rubberized coating $3k and someone carrying that same bag is upset with buying a $30 hot dog????
Did he have a posted $30 price, or did he let people assume it would be something less outrageous like five bucks, and then say, “Here’s your hotdog, that will be $30?” “No, you can’t give it back to me, you’ve touched it.”
If the first, it’s a high price and he’s charging what the traffic will bear. If the second, it’s deceptive.
i did... No, I agree that any product or service is worth whatever you can get for it.he charged more than his boss told him to charge then pocketed the difference, cost his boss money and damaged his reputation, that is a THIEF!
People complained about him, but never complain about the government seizing hard-earned money from citizens.
His boss exercised his “Free Market Right” to fire the $30.00 hot dog man. Capitalism brought regulation upon itself and regulation has gone too far.
30 bucks a hot dog? Why, I could go elsewhere in the city and buy a cheeseburger for only 25 bucks. That hot dog seller sure is stupid.
;-)
Reminds me of an Abbot and Costello skit. Costello was selling apples from a cart for 1 million each. He wanted to get rich.
He is a con artist.
I bet he asked the tourists for the money after they had the dog, pressuring them.
having been in the same situation overseas in a country where i felt like a stranger, didn't speak the language and couldn't really figure out what stuff costs, i agree, the guy is a con artist and should be busted.
Like the poor idiots who buy Air Jordans. When do the sneaker manufacturers get "fired"?
I don't get it. didn't the steward just bone the master out of 50% of what he was owed? what am i missing?
One of Connecticut’s best hot dog is a cart on the side of the word. The guy doesn’t have a phone, so you have to drive Route 202 to find him. He doesn’t charge $30, but he is expensive.
If I’m not mistaken, that ‘home’ in Tampa is being sued by Tampa, for not paying tenants for work done. The ‘Home’ owns a few retail stores, and the tenants work there in exchange for their room.
Had he been charging everyone $25-30, I'd say, Go for it. Heh heh, stupid tourists.
(Apparently, people are making a lot of money charging high fees for rides on the Staten Island Ferrry. It's free. So people aren't sure who to pay because it has to cost something, right? It's New York,)
I do miss the soup guy. I used to work over there.
Agree too.
This is not something like a gasoline shortage where one station charges $20 per gallon - that can be debated as gouging (I won’t take a strong stand on it, but I still think market forces should be permitted).
In this case, there are PLENTY OF OPTIONS for food - other hot dog stands, and, I’m sure if his customers looked hard enough, they might even discover that New York City has more than a handful of eating establishments.
As to the “taking advantage of tourists”, that does not fly here (it does when a taxi takes captive and unfamiliar foreigners on a sightseeing ride just to run up the meter). The difference here is that anyone coming to this country as a tourist better either have a calculator or be able to do math in his head (being that they are, by definition, not American public school education, I suspect that most can do math in their heads). You have to do the math (monetary conversions) to tell if you’re being scammed. I’ve been to expensive countries and knew immediately if I was being ripped off, and I’ve told co-travelers (we were tourists) that they can have dinner without my family - we ate cold soup from cans and also had some good snacks we brought with us (it was really good, actually).
And another thing: Thomas Sowell (I believe) has made this point in the past, and it is brilliant.
It basically goes like this - if not for people willing to spend huge amounts of money on a novelty, the novelty could never become mainstream. For example, calculators were not cheap when they first came out, but people that had bucks bought them. That gave the manufacturers the capital needed to start bringing down the prices, and the cycle continues to this day, where you can buy a simple one at Dollar Tree (and yes, at Dollar Tree, unlike the fake ones, everything is a dollar or less).
Now this hot dog stand may not be on the cutting edge of innovation (other than possibly showing how much people will voluntarily overpay), but who is to make that call?
Who? His boss.
“Who? His boss.”
I guess...the company does have a business reputation to maintain. But if there’s no contractual agreement, then it’s rude to get rid of him (I don’t know either way, regarding the terms he works under).
But, having been to NYC a time or two or three...perhaps this will result in a policy/law shift, and require that these guys DISPLAY their prices, rather than make a “judgment call” whenever someone asks what the price is.
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