From the Telegraph
Roger Bannister, his brother Steven and their wives Wendy and Joyce were astounded to be charged 16 euros (£13.50) each on Sunday after ordering four ice creams at the Antica Roma bar and gelateria close to the Spanish Steps.Well, yes. "close to the Spanish steps". Buy a small coffee on the Champs-Elysee in Paris and you pay €13 to sit outside. Walk off the Champs-Elysee and into a local cafe and you pay €4 at worst.
"And when we paid up, they didn't even say thank you," Mr Bannister, of Birmingham, told Corriere della Sera newspaper on Monday, holding up the receipt to prove the amount he had been charged.Well, they don't really have to care. You're buying maybe one ice cream, per year from them. If they're polite or otherwise with you, they still don't get repeat business. There's plenty of other people who will do likewise.
Officials in Rome said it was shameful that the tourists had been charged so much and that such practises harmed the image of Italy.
"It's a scandal and it should be treated as such," said Matteo Costantini, a city councillor. "It's not the first time that things like this have happened." In 2009 a restaurant near Piazza Navona, one of the city's most popular with tourists, massively overcharged a Japanese couple for dinner, handing them a bill for 695 euros.
Imagine if Rome applied a bit of tax to these places? "Right, we spend a load of money keeping the Trevi fountains looking nice, the main beneficiaries of these locally are your businesses, so we're going to charge a £1m tax on your ice cream parlour, take it or leave it". Think they'd be complaining then?
It's what towns and cities do with street food licenses. The public wants a hot dog from a van, they can buy a hot dog. To avoid the street getting cluttered with vendors, they have limited numbers of licenses, but because they know that you make money hand over fist from doing it, the licenses aren't cheap, and licenses vary according to locations. Councils extract the rent for monopoly rights to locations that are enhanced by the state. It's a form of LVT that already exists in the UK and it works very well.
9 comments:
I would have looked at the highly visible price list before ordering...but maybe I am just a pendant
Agreed. A genuine hot dog vendor told me that a licence for a pitch near a tourist attraction in London was a hundred thousand pounds a year, he couldn't make up his mind whether it was worth it or not.
It maybe that the drawbacks of a more free-for-all, competitive set-up are illustrated by the Glasgow Ice Cream War of the 1980's, in which people got killed and others were fitted up with prison sentences it took them 20 years to
get clear of. Mind you the ice cream vans were running drugs and stolen goods which must have sharpened the competitive edge somewhat.
@MW Time for a pronunciamento on the CLASS LVT paper?
DBC, I left a comment over there, it all seems a bit timid to me, if you exempt all houses worth less than £2 million then you've just lost ninety per cent of your tax base.
DBC,
The ice cream van wars were really about drug turf, where standard free market rules are replaced by violence.
Graeme,
He's Roger Bannister. He could have run half a mile and back in 4 minutes with ice creams from a cheaper location.
DBC, over at LabourList we've got one of those idiots who says the tax will be passed on to tenants, and farmers will either go out of business or double their prices.
Agreed. A genuine hot dog vendor told me that a licence for a pitch near a tourist attraction in London was a hundred thousand pounds a year, he couldn't make up his mind whether it was worth it or not.
Just out of curiosity, how is busking treated?
Kj, same as anywhere I guess, all very informal and not really legal or illegal.
London Underground has official places with a rota system where you put your name down on a list. I think that this is a free service.
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