NYC's Underground Grilled Cheese | Hacker News Reader

NYC's Underground Grilled Cheese

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129 pointswyclif48 comments

Interviewer: So, Why [do they call you] Ronnie?

Ronnie: Well, it's the perfect pseudonym because it's my name also.

This is the funniest thing I've read all day.

He will probably need to up his price from $5 to $10 if he goes legal. The increased overhead (especially in NYC) will kill the operation.

If he wants to be really clever, he could offer on-demand pricing and ensure that he doesn't get overloaded with order and fail to deliver on time. People would text and say "how much?". Then he would reply with the on-demand pricing "$5 in 20 minutes or $15 in 5 minutes."

If someone in the subway is REALLY hungry they'd probably pay $15 for a sandwich - especially if they know there's a two hour ride home.

You are over thinking this. The greatest part about this story is the simplicity. I bring sandwich to you - you give me $5

I'm trying to find the sustainable model in this operation. From reading the article he's obviously trying to take it to the next level. Having good advice from a hacker (such as on-demand pricing) could make his next move that much more likely to succeed. Hacker News is about creating and improving upon ideas. We're not here to keep the status quo - we're here to say you can do more and do it better...

NEWNAM: So what's next?

RONNIE: Next I'm looking to get into a legal kitchen. For example, a restaurant that isn't open for lunch. I would rent it out from them and just work the lunch shift delivering sandwiches everywhere.

I don't think the answer is to have a complicated fee structure, just charge more.

Much like food carts, this sounds like "clever ways to get around NYC real estate prices for commercially zoned kitchens". It isn't sustainable legally.

To get a street vending permit for a food cart in NYC, you have to resort to going through black market channels. New street vending permits haven't been issued since 1993. A lot of the permits sold on the black market are fakes anyway and prices can amount to tens of thousands of dollars. It's astounding how you have to deal with corrupt people to "legally" get into the New York City street vending market.

Same with taxi medallions.

He can also use delivery times as an incentive the way Domino's used to, albeit in reverse: The sooner he gets it to you, the more you pay.

(Meaning, not to offer it outright in fixed increments like $5 for 20, etc., but as incentive for him to get there ASAP.)

Complicates things needlessly. By all means, charge more if necessary. But tiered pricing for a sandwich? I don't think so. Simplify.

The problem is he might become saturated with orders. He has two options - say he can't deliver or raise his prices so high that his remaining capacity will be filled with the highest priced customers.

As a customer I like choices and the on-demand pricing model allows him to tell his customers his product is always available - though sometimes at a higher cost.

So if he gets saturated w/ orders all he has to do is... hire another cook, or another delivery guy.

He could have like a whole network of sandwich makers, and a full-on switchboard to take the orders if it got too crazy.

But if he hires another cook, he's paying the cook when he tells the cook his hours are, whether or not it turns out he actually needs the cook for all of those times. If he were consistently saturated, hiring another cook is a good idea, but if it's just saturation that lasts under an hour, congestion pricing is a better model than increasing capacity and losing a lot of money when he's not using the capacity.

Can't he hire another cook as a subcontractor and also pay him with an on-demand model?

If someone in the subway is REALLY hungry they'd probably pay $15 for a sandwich - especially if they know there's a two hour ride home.

Also, someone coming out of a bar or club after last call might pay $20 or more for one.

Running his service at those hours is more consistent with the drug-dealer analogy, too.

Lot of illegal consumables innovation in NYC these days as well: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/nyregion/21nutcracker.html...

With only two texts I could have a delicious grilled cheese and a nice styrofoam cup of Nutcracker!

see also: the twitter lobster roll guy in greenpoint http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/33/20/wb_lobsterman_201...

got caught: http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/33/34/wb_drclawcuffed_2...

His gangster persona is brilliant marketing.

This story keeps getting media coverage and is presented as a good thing.

I wonder though. Coverage makes clear that running a small business like this is illegal in NYC and the only alternative is to acquire costly government permission to engage in basic entrepreneurial activity that would be legal in any normal free state.

With food in particular there aren't actually that many places in the western world where you can legally run an unlicensed/uninspected operation at significant scale. People think of Texas, for example, as a libertarian-leaning state, but it's actually completely illegal in TX to sell home-prepared food, even at church bake sales (though in practice it's not enforced for small-scale charity bake sales). There are a handful of states that have recently passed "cottage food laws" that allow people to sell home-baked goods in certain categories below a certain volume, so e.g. it's now legal in Ohio to sell modest amounts of cupcakes and cookies and whatever. But not that many, and most don't cover food outside of baked goods and perhaps some kinds of home preserves (marmalades and similar).

That's interesting. I was wondering about this in the context of a site like etsy where there are dozens of people selling baked goods over the internet.

My guess is that a lot of that stuff violates local laws, but going after them would be a hassle and unpopular. Especially when they're really small-scale businesses selling things that are unlikely to cause food poisoning (mostly baked goods, rather than home-smoked pork or something), and doing so person-to-person rather than via a physical storefront.

I like where these cottage food laws are going. I'm just thinking out loud, but I'd be interested in seeing a system where smaller outfits would simply be required to post some kind of notification that they are unlicensed/uninspected. This might also be accompanied by a higher cap on claims resulting from food poisoning lawsuits or something similar.

From a policy maker point of view this would be saying 'we are going to allow unsafe goods to be sold'. While I personally agree with the sentiment, it's never going to happen.

What? Your Mom bakes unsafe cookies?

Huh?

Joe's point was that your mom's kitchen is neither licensed nor inspected by the state. Yet, she served you baked goods out of that kitchen. The false implication that unlicensed == unsafe is what he was commenting on.

If they were safe enough for you to eat, they're probably safe enough for me to eat, regardless of whether she has a seal from the state.

Oh I see. But that's unrelated to the discussion. Fact is that to produce and sell food outside of the 'home' setting requires a license, for food safety reasons. While we (or rather, other people - myself I'm not so much interested in that discussion) could argue about whether or not that's warranted, fact is that such regulations exist and they are very unlikely to go away.

Now, while technically 'unlicensed' does not equal 'unsafe', the existence of 'licensed' outfits, for safety reasons, does mean that 'unlicensed' means 'we cannot verify the safety'. Which, realistically, is as good as 'unsafe' in terms of pressure against it.

(This is not a discussion about actual food safety, this is about processes and pressures on policy makers and perceptions of control.)

(edit: add 'un' to 'likely')

Of course its going away; folks have commented on this - allowing church bake sales etc.

Agreed on other points however. There are Mom's Kitchens I would definitely NOT want to eat out of. And licensing means (or used to mean) inspecting.

Favorite bit:

  NEWNAM: So why Ronnie?
  RONNIE: Well, it's the perfect pseudonym because it's my name also.

If those sandwiches are 100% cheddar they're missing the flavor that only gruyere can bring to a grilled cheese.

we got him to cater a lunch at our start-up... i think most of us weren't very keen on the sandwiches, though we thought it was great in the abstract.

I was thinking about a similar service paired with a smartphone app. You're in Central Park, and you're thirsty, you press a button in an app, and a guy on a bike finds you from GPS coordinates and gives you a bottle of water.

Something like this could revolutionize Taxi service. No talking to a dispatcher, fumbling with your wallet, or dealing with credit card numbers, just bring up an app and press a button.

Funny, I was just talking with a friend last night about the viability of a cheese sandwich cart/stall in NYC. They're extremely cheap to produce (plain wheat bread and Kraft singles) and when hot, are delicious snacks. I was thinking of a price point closer to $1, since you can easily get so much food in the city for around $5 (gyros, chicken w/ rice, etc). Interesting to see someone doing it already!

Assuming you can even get ahold of the appropriate licenses to run a cart/stall, that's between $10-20k right there. Now add on the cost of paying someone to take orders at your stand, the stand itself, heating element, insurance, etc... that's a lot of $1 cheese sandwiches.

Oh, and watch out for the hot dog stand guy or the guy selling beads near you who thinks you're encroaching on their turf.

His business isn't going to scale very well. I've never been to NYC but I expect you can't cover much of the city in 15 minutes.

It seems that he only delivers to people in the Lower East Side for now. Of course, food delivery has operated on a limited geography basis since...well pretty much since its inception.

Franchise.

Hmmm, someone needs to build an "AirBnB for Lunch" so Ronnie can take orders online

what's the number?

That's another thing he's got going for him: cachet.

Care to explain?

Sorry for the delay, I missed your comment earlier. I simply meant that it sounds mysterious, and it doesn't seem he has any competitors yet, or has franchised it. It sounds like it originated in a Seinfeld episode or something. There are ways to leverage the exclusivity factor.

Looking for the number as well.

Sort of an interesting exercise... Can you find it? If that piece of information is available online somewhere, how would you get it (calling all of your stoner friends is probably the fastest way, but disallowed for this exercise).

I couldn't find it, so I called AMEX concierge service to see if they could.

edit: boo, i suck. was easy to find, but i missed it the first time.

I'm more curious if the AMEX concierge was able to find it.

917-727-6643. See related article at http://unionsquarenyc.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/three-words-b...

I'm pretty sure this is the same guy, but not 100%.

found it: 917.727.6643

i had a similar business idea in college. breakfast express, an all day breakfast delivery for hungover college students.

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