QUEENS, New York-

Pasang Sherpa of Queens, New York was just your everyday immigrant trying to live the American Dream and make an honest living. Pasang just wanted to make his mark, while providing for his family like every other hard working American. Pasang must have thought he won the New York State Lottery when the city’s parks department auctioned off the rights to the city’s most sought after vendor location at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He must have thought he had died and gone to heaven by landing that sort of prime real estate. But in America, some say, nothing is that easy. There was a catch to this beautiful winning story. The annual rent for the spot Pasang occupied was a whopping $643,000 a year, nearly $54,000 a month to sell “bleeping” hot dogs.

Okay, so I know the cost of living in New York City is a lot higher than in other parts of the country, but let’s do some quick math. So $54,000 a month, is $1,800 a day. Let’s say Pasang works from dusk till dawn 7-7, seven days a week. That means poor Pasang would have to sell 150 hot dogs every hour for 12 straight hours. Let’s switch the math up a little. How much could a hot dog cost in New York City? $3, $4, $5? Let’s be real generous and say a hot dog vendor standing in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art can sell his scrumptious dogs for $8 a pop (I’ve never been to NY, but I doubt it). At $8 a pop that would mean he has to sell 225 dogs a day or 28 an hour over 8 hours, or 19 an hour over 12 hours (quite possible)….but that’s just to pay his stinking rent. Again, I’m thinking $8 a dog is quite high and that doesn’t even cover the cost of his supplies or any profit he may want to make as a business man trying to make a living and support his family in the great state of New York. No matter which way you look at it, no place in the world is worth $1,800 dollars a day to sell hot dogs, much less anything else.

As a small rebuttal against Pasang Sherpa, he had to have had some idea going in what the rent would be for that prime piece of hot dog real estate, and if so, why on Earth would he get himself into something like that? He was finally evicted when he became $310,000 behind on his payments.

The moral of the story: When the cost of occupying a 10×10 piece of land is the same as the mortgage on a mansion, it’s definitely time to move.

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