Short-Term Food Cart Rentals

Don't we all have a great idea for a food to sell from a cart?

Mine is bacon. You can take a strip of crisp bacon and wrap the end in a little bit of foil or napkin and you don't even need a stick. It's the perfect "to go" food in these carb-phobic times. Plus, it's delicious. My bacon booth would have all kinds of bacon. Since August, I've been the lucky recipient of a Bacon of the Month club subscription, thanks to Dave, Melissa and Amy, so I have some sense of the range of bacon flavors out there. And I'd have some dipping sauces, too: maple syrup, ranch, ketchup. Tell me you're not drooling just thinking about it.

Justin and Erin and friends had the idea for an okonomiyaki or Japanese pancake cart. I think that would be delicious. Okonomiyaki combines some of my favorite foods like shrimp, bacon, mayonnaise, mustard, cabbage, and fry. I would drive halfway across town for that, even if I had to eat it in a Walgreen's parking lot.

In the past I've thought of: savory ice cream carts, dumpling carts (all kinds of dumplings, from pot stickers to apple), potato carts (just boiled potatoes -- but cheap!), and a raw-food cart that served cut up vegetables which would double as a produce cart. All of them, I'm convinced, could be money makers.

But that's what everyone who's ever conceived of a food cart thinks.

So, here is where the real money comes in: renting a food cart on a short-term basis for large sums to people who have a delusions about the amount of money they'd make with their own food cart.

You'd want to have a good, busy corner or maybe at the Saturday Market. And then for a day at a time, you'd rent it out for maybe $300 a day or something to poor suckers who thought they really had something. And, honestly, $300 isn't that much to spend to have a dream crushed. Indeed, it's a bargain! That way, they could get it out of their system without having to make a huge investment.

And every once in awhile you'd have a success -- like savory waffles -- that would demonstrate that the whole thing was worth while. It would kind of be like a reality show, only much, much slower.

And for the customers, it would be great -- you'd never know what you'd get. Some days it would be terrible, some days awesome, but it would always be different.

There are some health code issues to be resolved, but those are technical details.