The Lowest Rung, but Still on the Ladder

Street vendors may be on the lowest rung of capitalism, but they are still on the ladder. Downtown business groups and local governments might see vendors and markets as a problem to be regulated, restricted or eliminated from the streets, but they simply attacking their kin.

Some vendors, those with the lowest overhead display merchandise in briefcases or portfolios, they spread blankets, use a hydrant or a trash can as a place to mark their space, but they are mobile and move to where they find the customer. Food vendors are also often employees. These nascent entrepreneurs take a basket of burritos, fruit, a cooler of drinks and provide fellow employees and passers-by with a bite to eat, either within the workplace but more likely from close by during a break in the day. Perhaps an empty lot has become a magnet for pushcarts or more elaborate displays. Merchants create their own infrastructure, protecting themselves and clients from the elements and allowing them to do business and people to shop.

This ecology of merchant is akin to the ecology of storefront retail and supplements store-fronts. We know historically that the merchant and market preceded storefront retail by hundreds of years, even early storefronts have their echos today in homes hosting businesses in less industrialized countries, rural areas within industrialized countries and immigrant neighborhoods in cities across the country.

The presence of the complete ecology is not to be feared, rather we should embrace it for the role they can play in the larger economy, fostering new business, creating wealth and mobility, developing personal characteristics that will sustain people and serve to motivate them in new circumstances. Merchants are not weeds in this ecology, they represent the seed of new business.