John and Joey prosper while Little Jimmy gets left behind: Naperville denies permit for a third food cart
Despite a unanimous recommendation of approval, the Naperville City Council voted to deny Little Jimmy’s Italian Ice a permit to operate a food cart in Naperville, while allowing John’s Rib House and Joey’s Red Hots to continue to operate.
Mobile food carts provide an inexpensive way for entrepreneurs to start a business and provide customers with a wide variety of low-cost food that can meet them where they are. But restrictions on mobile food vendors are all too common. And often, these restrictions are not based on the desire to protect the health and safety of consumers, but to protect favored, established businesses. That’s exactly what the Naperville City Council did when it denied Little Jimmy’s Italian Ice a mobile food cart permit on Jan. 20.
Naperville requires mobile food vendors to obtain a permit and limits their number and location. Since 2012, Naperville has had two mobile food cart operators: John’s Rib House, which operates near the Chicago Avenue parking deck, and Joey’s Red Hots, which operates on Main Street adjacent to the Naperville Riverwalk.
This year, Little Jimmy’s Italian Ice sought a mobile food cart permit for the same location as Joey’s Red Hots, which sells hot dogs. But Little Jimmy’s had to obtain approval from the City Council to obtain the permit, because Naperville allows only two mobile foods carts to operate.
Despite a unanimous recommendation of approval from a panel consisting of city staff, a representative from the Downtown Naperville Alliance and a representative from the Downtown Advisory Commission, the City Council voted to deny Little Jimmy’s a permit to operate a food cart in Naperville, while allowing John’s and Joey’s to continue to operate.
City Council members expressed concern that Little Jimmy’s would provide “too direct a competition” with existing brick-and-mortar restaurants, even though there are no such businesses that provide Italian ice in downtown Naperville. Regardless, protectionism is not a good reason to limit the choices of Naperville residents or to stop someone from earning a living in the business of their choosing. Both entrepreneurs and customers would be better off if the City Council allowed as much competition as possible.
Council member Doug Krause, who once owned a business downtown, questioned the City Council members’ assumption that allowing Little Jimmy’s to operate its food cart downtown would hurt restaurants. Mobile food vendors and brick-and-mortar restaurants are different and serve customers differently. There is no reason to believe the existence of one will necessarily hurt the other. Mobile food vendors tend to provide food on a much smaller scale than brick-and-mortar restaurants and often operate based on the weather, limiting or ceasing their operations on cold or rainy days.
Some argue that mobile food vendors have an unfair advantage because they do not have to pay property taxes. But that’s only because mobile food vendors don’t own or rent property, which has clear advantages of its own: restaurants can operate during bad weather and provide a comfortable place for their customers to eat. And if wasn’t for the city’s own restrictions on mobile food vendors, those restaurants could offer their own mobile food carts if they thought doing so would be profitable.
Allowing consumers to make decisions on what they prefer is a far better way to determine what the community needs than allowing members of the City Council to make that decision. Naperville and all local governments should lift limits on mobile food vendors and allow their communities to reap the benefits that such vendors provide to entrepreneurs and customers alike.