Street vendor selling cellphone cases fined 2G for cart being 1 inch higher than 5 foot limit

New York Post ^ | 10/08/2012 | SALLY GOLDENBERG

[SeekAndFind]

The priciest real estate in New York is just a few inches of SoHo.

A street vendor hawking cellphone cases was slapped with $2,250 in fines for selling from a table that stood 1 inch too high and 2 inches too close to the nearest store entrance.

Alessane Fall — who lives in The Bronx with his wife and six children — intends to fight the three tickets he received from the same officer on Sept. 20 because, he says, city regulations are crippling entrepreneurs.

“I don’t know why the city is giving out tickets, but we’re here just to work, to feed our family, make sure our family goes to school,” Fall said.

“We come all the way from Africa looking for a better country.”

He’ll appear before a city administrative law judge next month.

One of the tickets states Fall’s cart was an inch over the 5-foot height limit for vending carts — a violation that costs up to $1,000.

“Defendant was observed with a vending cart taller than 5 feet — 5 feet, 1 inch,” the ticket reads.

When Fall measured his table for The Post, it came in at 4 feet, 10 inches — but a clip holding down some merchandise pushed it to 5 feet, 1 inch.

The police officer who fined Fall wrote a second ticket claiming the cart was 2 inches shy of the required 20 feet that’s supposed to separate a vendor from the nearest store entrance.

Fall insists he was more than 20 feet away.

[Alberta's Child]

The flip side of this is that a "business owner" has no real grounds to complain about socialism when his "business" involves selling things on a public sidewalk.

I may be overly simplistic about this, but the presence of many street vendors is a sure sign of a socialist system in place.

[Lazamataz]

New York City supports itself on this absolute insanity.

Personally, I refuse to even violate the airspace of this hostile communist foreign nation-state.

[Lazamataz]

I may be overly simplistic about this, but the presence of many street vendors is a sure sign of a socialist system in place.

It's what I saw when I went to Russia, in 1997. Their abortive attempt at capitalism had many street vendors milling about. I remember being in Red Square, and someone hawked something to our small group, and a burly man clapped his hand on the shoulder of the vendor and escorted him away to punishments unknown. It's illegal to sell on Red Square -- curious, because in history, Red Square was the town market.