Thursday, November 05, 2009
"Small Businesses to NYC: Get Off Our Backs!"
I think we all should have a lot of respect for small business owners.
They certainly seem to have the odds stacked against them...
They certainly seem to have the odds stacked against them...
At City-Journal.org, Steven Malanga has this and more:
"Morton Sloan feels besieged. Over the last several years, the Bronx-based entrepreneur has watched the property taxes on the ten Morton Williams supermarkets he runs in the city swell by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Increasingly aggressive city inspectors now linger in those stores for hours, writing costly citations for items that clerks accidentally mislabel. Some of Sloan’s suppliers say they’ll no longer deliver to New York City because of the Department of Transportation’s frequent parking-ticket blitzes. It gets worse: a new Bloomberg-administration program that encourages fruit and vegetable vendors to set up on street corners has left him scrambling to match prices with competitors who don’t have to pay rent, utilities, payroll taxes, and various other expenses. And now the city wants to plunk a 60,000-square-foot supermarket into a heavily subsidized new development just blocks from two of his stores. 'I’ve never received a subsidy or asked anything of the city in 35 years, except to be left alone to do business,' Sloan says. 'But everywhere I look these days, it seems like the city is trying to make life tough for me.'"
