Run over by a food truck

Tonight at the Planning Board there area  few items, like the agenda item on the building of an assisted living home on the site of the old Chevy’s.   There’s also a request for a use permit for a hair salon on Webster.   Apparently this is to move an existing business but it’s still getting opposition because no one wants another hair salon to open up even though people seem to actually use these businesses.  The big item will be the public scoping for Ron Cowan’s final chance at building more housing units.  That should bring out quite a coalition of folks, but this is just a scoping meeting so, yes, make sure to submit your comments, but there will not be any action taken on this item tonight.

One thing that I did find interesting on the agenda but was shuffled under the consent calendar was a follow up on a request by Planning Board Member Lorre “you can’t go furniture shopping on a bike” Zuppan.  During a routine follow up on how the food truck frenzy at South Shore was doing she volunteered the information that some Park Street restaurants had told her that the existence of the food trucks was hurting their businesses.   Also Pearl’s — now turned into a Five Guys — claimed that the Food Trucks cut into their margin so much that was why they closed down.   So Board Member Zuppan wanted some information around this.

City staff has provided this information in a staff report and it essentially says, well, we can’t really drill down to exact information but in general here is how the outlook appears when you compare the sales tax collected from Quarter 2, 2012 (before the food trucks came to town) to Quarter 2, 2013 (after the food trucks came to town).   In general the staff report estimated that the Food Trucks bring about 1,400 people weekly and about 400 people at any given time.  South Shore itself has seen an uptick in foot traffic, which is a good thing I am guessing.   Probably helps them market to prospective tenants.

Anyway, here’s what the numbers look like for the South Shore only food tenants , this does not include fast food so no McDonalds or Burger King:

So if you notice things stayed pretty much the same.  There was a slight dip in Restaurants with no alcohol but it was very minor.  Everything else went up.

For the Park Street restaurants here is the comparison:

So everything went up, restaurants that served liquor didn’t move up quite as much but American Oak was closed for a fair amount of time so I wonder if that contributed to the rates not being as high.

So from a pure numbers perspective, overall the restaurants on Park Street and South Shore did better this year than they did before.   Maybe it could be that there are more restaurants and therefore the greater number of restaurants are generating more sales taxes even though the overall share per restaurant might be down.  Who knows.   Short of the restaurants that are complaining opening their books for the City Staff to review there really is no other way for staff to do this sort of analysis.