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Author: team ciaooo
ciaooo! is an NYC based editorial site, newsletter, and events company. We're the local's guide to conquering NYC. Follow us on Instagram @ciaooomag for the latest. Nice to see you here!
WhatToOrder is the only dining resource that starts by showing you every single restaurant in your chosen location and does so without altering the ranking of results in any way. Download the app HERE for free.
“The fire captain called me up and told me, “Thank you for taking care of us. Even before Corona. You guys have always looked out for us”.
Joe Paolillo Jr, one half of the A&S Fine Foods Pork Store in Gravesend, Brooklyn is shouting to me over the phone over the hustle and bustle of employees prepping in the kitchen. Of the 20+ businesses we’ve spoken to since the quarantine has been put in place in NYC, this, is by far, one of the busiest.
Since the Pandemic hit, aside from their regular clientele, A&S has fed every single area hospital, fire department, and police station, even partnering with The Mets to feed workers. They’ve pivoted their business from catering and sales of fine Italian meats, and prepared foods to also, delivering fresh fruits, vegetables, and groceries to the neighborhood. For Easter, the group also drove around the neighborhood dressed as the Easter Bunny handing out treats to kids (while socially distancing, of course).
The impact of a small business on their community is most relevant now. Multitudes of restaurants have stepped up, providing much-needed resources to their communities where the government has failed.
It’s a jarring difference considering newscasts have reported that 75% of restaurants will be shut down for good after the Pandemic. NYC legends like Lucky Strike, Pegu Club, and Gotham Bar and Grill all closed permanently, that citing loss of income, lack of federal loan support, and an overall drop in clientele. For neighborhoods like Chinatown, those numbers are even higher.
In an earlier report inspired by this Food and Wine article, we wrote about the predatory commission fees by food delivery apps like Seamless, UberEats, Caviar, and their effect on small businesses.
Several of the restauranteurs we interviewed described the apps as a double-edged sword – they needed the brand awareness, and for some, the delivery drivers, but the 25 – 30% commissions were simply eating away into their margins.
TJ Hyder, General Manager of Benny’s Burritos in the West Village mentioned, “After all is said and done, we make a 3% profit margin on deliveries”. On a $25 order (not including taxes or delivery fees), that’s a profit of 75 cents.
On top of that, the commission percentage each restaurant agrees to pay has a direct impact on its default search ranking, meaning the more you pay, the higher your rank. When you’re searching for a burger to order, you’re not seeing the closest shops to you, you’re getting whoever paid the most.
For the mom and pop shops that rely on word of mouth, and are without social media savvy, or the extra funds to pay these sites, they get pushed to the bottom where they’re rarely seen, or perhaps, not even listed at all.
When you’re searching for a burger to order, you’re not seeing the closest shops to you, you’re getting whoever paid the most.
In a preliminary search, we did amongst some of the mom and pop shops in our neighborhood of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, A&S did not appear once amongst UberEats, Caviar, or Seamless. Ironically, the closest and fastest delivery UberEats suggested in our area were the holy trinity of megacorps – Mcdonalds, Taco Bell, and Chipotle.
Think of it as a digital elephant graveyard, with older, smaller, or non-English speaking businesses getting royally shafted over. The discovery of a small business in a neighborhood is simply nonexistent online, nor in one place.
“Preserving the city’s culture of small, independent restaurants is a part of our mission long before the lockdown. This is why we list as many restaurants as we can in all five boroughs, including many places that can’t afford to maintain a website”
Rob Fraley – founder of WhatToOrder
Rob Fraley, the founder of WhatToOrder hopes his new app can help solve this. Unlike traditional sites that use a “pay to play” type search methodology, the site has an open search engine for finding food and restaurants, sans ads, and sans reviews. This gives every restaurant, no matter how small, a fair opportunity to be seen.
You can also search by more specific criteria, like dish name, ingredient combinations, reservation, and delivery partners, even offering 20 dietary and environmental filters like gluten-free, dairy-free, grass-fed, and GMO-free. It’s a free and fair marketing and distribution channel for restaurants (and a fun discovery tool for you to find what’s good in your area).
Democratic, but like, actually democratic.
On top of that, the app includes thousands of restaurants across all five boroughs, not just the hot spots with a good marketing budget. For some of the most affected businesses like Chinatown with several cash-only, non-digital shops, WhatToOrder could be just the saving grace they need to get online in front of many eyeballs, quick.
“To support the small, independent places, you first need a way to see who’s still offering takeout right now”
Using the app, you can still access any of the delivery apps and even check to see if the shop has its own commission-free online ordering system instead of calling up the place directly to save them the fee. It’s a Win-Win!
Small businesses are essential to keeping NYC alive. It’s how a Korean Uzbek keeps her culture alive at Cafe Lily. It’s where families get together for their Sunday fix of Indian food at Jackson Diner. It’s where neighbors can call A&S and be greeted by Joe Pork, or Matt, and a friendly face and for a moment feel like everything is back to normal again.
Small businesses build communities, and up to now, there hasn’t been one place to show them. Until now.
You can download the app WhatToOrder for free HERE. Know a small business that might benefit from being featured? Email us at hello@ciaooomag.com.
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Earlier this week, Mayor DeBlasio announced the suspension of Electronics recycling and organic waste collection till June 30, 2020, as part of the $1.3 billion budget cuts (which also included cuts on NYC public beaches and summer programs). As the city’s lift on lockdown seems to only move further and further into the future, the concern over essential workers comes to the bay.
Since April, over 500 DSNY employees have been confirmed to have the Coronavirus, with many reporting a lack of masks, gloves, or any type of guidance of protection from higher-ups. Since reporting, 4 of them have passed away. In March, all 3 of Staten Island’s sanitation garages were shut down to be sanitized after the staff was confirmed sick. It’s a drastic difference from February of this year, when we wrote this article on the PLASTIC BAG BAN and how it was one step closer to getting New York City towards greener pastures.
Before the ban could fully go in place, we were hit by the Pandemic which promptly put an end to that. Like a Mentos being dropped into a Pepsi bottle, the usage of single-use plastic has skyrocketed into a blindingly, abrasive, sticky mess. You can thank the surge of toilet paper, sanitizer, and good ol’ Amazon deliveries for that.
After all – it’s not like doctors can reuse face shields and masks (oh wait, they are..oh America.) Regardless, the actual moneymaking behind recycling is dropping. With oil prices going down, it’s cheaper to MAKE plastic from scratch, than it is to recycle the former. If there’s no money to made, then there are no changes to be made. We learned this the hard way during this pandemic.
What might really come as a bigger shock is that America actually used to sell millions of plastic tons of waste to China, which was then converted into new products. In fact, China bought up over 70% of the world’s plastic waste up until last March, when the government decided to ban imports of trash after multiple reports of illegal dumping of trash across the country.
In a report by NPR last year, Martin Bourque, who ran one of the oldest recycling operations in the U.S hid a GPS tracking device in one of his trash piles that traveled from Berkley, California all the way to a village in China, only to find:
“dumping in the local canyon of materials they couldn’t recycle, plastic in the farmland incorporated into the soil of the cornfields nearby,”
You mean there’s corruption in the sanitation business? That doesn’t sound crazy at all.
While Tony Soprano is a character, the mafia has had a wild history with the sanitation industry
As Pandemic fears grow day by day, suddenly the idea of tossing a bag to avoid getting sick doesn’t sound so bad, but for the millions of pounds of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) that hospitals and frontline workers use, there won’t be ANY recycling. That’s medical waste, and since the virus can live for multiple days on surfaces, people are freaking TF out. In cities all across the country, sanitation workers are striking, calling for more PPE and downright getting sick.
Most medical waste gets incinerated or goes straight to the trash (which, btw shameless plug – check out our article on how NYC was once a raging dumpster fire in the 1960s due to the hundreds of incinerators).
If the plastic glove littered streets of NYC are any sign of what’s to come, it seems the world of single-use plastic is here to stay. At the moment, recycling is still considered essential, though several residents have complained of recycling not being picked up in their apartment buildings, or worse, simply being thrown in the trash.
Do us a favor and try to avoid buying so much single-use plastic at home, hook up your neighborhood DSNY worker with some gloves, masks, and maybe a Venmo.
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Don’t Be Fooled By The Rocks That They Got
Earlier this week, power couple Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez submitted a bid to purchase the METS in partnership with JP Morgan to raise capital. Their combined net worth is reputed to be over $700 million.
Corona Discount Pricing?
Last December, the Wilpon family was in talks to sell an 80% stake to billionaire Steve Cohen but the deal fell through. The team was valued at $2.6 billion pre-Corona, BUT with the future of live sporting events as murky as a 2-day old pool of rain in the NYC subway – experts are estimating the team’s value is now a measly $1.5 billion.
From music to sports mogul
This isn’t the first time a musician owned a part of a sports team in NYC. Jay Z notoriously “bought up” the Nets back in 2004 though he only owned .067% (LESS than 1 percent) for $1 million dollars.
The future of the Mets may be unknown but hey, it’s nothing a Mets fan isn’t used to.
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#TODAYINHISTORY
May 1st aka Moving Day in NYC. Ever since the colonial times, May 1st was one of the wildest days in NYC. If you thought moving was annoying, imagine if EVERYONE moved on the same day, every year. All leases in the city used to expire at 9AM on May 1st at the same time.
And You Thought Moving was rough in NYC?
It’s estimated that over a million people in the city all changed their residences at the same time. It wasn’t until the start of World War II that Moving Day ended, as the moving industry lost their strapping young men overseas.
Not to be confused with “Mayday!”
The term “Mayday” was created by Frederick Mockford, a radio officer at Croydon Airport in London as an international distress call in 1948 after the French word m’aider, which means “help me.
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