You don’t have to be a genius to know that starting a retail business in New York is a horrible idea. Naturally, as with all things, there are exceptions to this rule. Rice to Riches, Nolita’s infamous rice-pudding shop, is somehow doing well enough to expand to the Lower East Side. If you open a smoke shop, it might do all right, so long as you also sell drugs out of the back. E-bike repair joints have a steady stream of customers when they’re not burning to the ground. The few remaining specialty stores—places such as Balloon Saloon, the Fountain Pen Hospital, Gramercy Typewriter Company—have charmed their way out of the electric chair, if not exactly off death row.
But even the most useless actuary would advise you against opening a newsstand. New Yorkers have a Thomas Edison–like indefatigability when it comes to bad real-estate deals, but in a city of more than eight million people, it’s telling that nobody lately has been crazy enough to say, “Actually, why not magazines?” (Doesn’t Don’t F**k with Newsstands sound like it’s already a Netflix show?) Go ahead, name one that’s opened in the last five years and is still a going concern—and, yes, “going concern” is the right way to put it. You can’t.
