“I had seen pedicabs all over New York City and when one of my friends started riding in my hometown of DC, it just clicked,” Brizendine said of the creation of Ocean City, MD based Coastal CruZn, LLC. “Saurabh and I are both passionate about doing our part to contribute to the environment, so the progression into creating a pedicab business just came naturally.”

The co-owners have proved their commitment to environmental awareness through a number of different aspects. Coastal CruZn has a component in its employee handbook that mandates employees come into work with at least three recyclable items. What do they do with these recyclables? Why donate it to an affiliate company, Atayne, which makes athletic gear completely out of recyclables of course.

The two entities, Atayne and Coastal CruZn, are also teaming up to organize an environmental fundraiser in Ocean City, MD the first week of August. Atayne is focused primarily around the running world and Coastal around biking, so the entities thought a hybrid bike and foot race would prove to attract a diverse crowd.

“It’s all for a good cause and we are both so pumped to get started,” Brizendine said.

Coastal CruZn, LLC anticipates launching its venture on Memorial Day in Ocean City, MD, with high hopes in a market that has never gotten the privilege of experiencing pedicabs. Local Ocean City businessman Nick Campagnoli commented, “What these young guys are doing is absolutely incredible. They’re providing jobs, doing their part to contribute to the overall cleanliness and adding to the majesty of Ocean City by offering a new experience.”

There are many pedicab businesses all over the world but the owners maintain that what differentiates them is their utmost commitment to entertaining their “pedicabees” (which is Coastal’s nickname for their base of loyal consumers). They emphasize that extensive knowledge of the area and unique personalities of the drivers are the leading forces to keeping their pedicabees coming back for more.

“We feel that anyone can start a pedicab business, but we want to make sure that everyone involved in our organization is passionate about impacting the environment and people’s lives,” co-owner Saurabh Chawla said. “We carefully choose Coastal CruZn employees that exhibit how proud they are of their organization. We also like our guys to get to know their pedicabees on a first name basis and form the kind of relationship that people can look back at after their vacation is over and just smile.”

From Pedicabs to Peddling Cosmetics, Economy Pushes Some to Seek Extra Work

Shelby Shenkelman enjoys working as a pricing analyst for a company that produces airline meals. At 25, she is making more than $50,000 a year.”It should not be a bad salary,” she said. That is, unless you have $30,000 in student loans, a $300 a month car payment, some credit card debt, grocery bills that seem to be going up and rent that definitely is going up. “I can survive on my one paycheck, but it’s very, very difficult. It’s very, very tight,” the Reston resident said. In December, she decided to take a second job. Two nights during the week and on weekend days, she works as a personal shopper at a clothing store, earning $9 an hour plus commission.

With a grim economic outlook for 2009, more Americans are not just cutting costs but are finding ways to make more money by taking part-time or odd jobs, employers and economists said. Many are doing it because their wages have stalled while the cost of living has gone up. Others are picking up extra work to pay off debt or cushion their savings. For others, it’s a backup plan in case they get laid off from their full-time jobs.

In a survey of 1,400 workers by the staffing firm Express Employment Professionals, 42 percent said they were looking for a second job to make ends meet. In a Pew Research Center survey of 2,413 adults, 24 percent said they or someone in their household has taken an extra job because of economic troubles.

Meanwhile, staffing agencies across the country are seeing an uptick in the number of people seeking evening and weekend jobs, even if they are overqualified for them. And traffic is increasing for Web sites such as SnagAJob.com that specialize in hourly work.
“I think a lot more people are open to just doing any kind of job, maybe not specifically in the field they have been trained for,” said Amy Little, branch manager of Manpower Inc., a national staffing agency. “They will just do anything and everything to make ends meet.”

For Nate Chenenko, having two jobs has made traveling on weekends more difficult. “My free time has a much higher opportunity cost now: Taking a weekend trip costs me the price of the trip plus the wages lost from missing work at my part-time job,” he said. On weekdays, Chenenko dons a collared shirt, tie and dress slacks and heads to the Navy Yard where he is a contract specialist for the U.S. Navy.

On Thursday and Friday nights and on weekends, he switches to ski pants and a cap and drives people around the District in a pedicab, or bike taxi. Since he started in October, he’s been making about $19 to $23 an hour pedaling as many as four people at a time to such destinations as Union Station and the White House. It’s a big help, he said, especially considering that he is making about $40,000 a year, and that his grocery and utility bills have gone up.

“Instead of buying or purchasing expensive things, I’m trying to save,” he said. “I took this to build up that safety net.”

Labor experts said you should avoid any conflicts with your primary employers by checking your employee handbook and making sure you are even allowed to take a second job. If a second job is permitted, be honest with your employer about your extracurricular work. And whatever you do, never do work for your second job while at your full-time one. Keeping that primary job should be a priority.

The critics were out again last week after The Times revealed that, faced with recession, Mr Mason was being forced to slow the store rollout programme. Worried? He hardly looks it. One minute, he’s jumping on to a Fresh & Easy rickshaw for a photo shoot; the next, he’s leading a chorus of Happy Birthday at the head office in Palm Beach, Los Angeles, to mark the chain’s first anniversary.

Asked about the prospect of a looming supermarket price war in America, he jokingly cites the line about amplifiers in This is Spinal Tap, the spoof “rockumentary”: “We’ll do better than the rest,” he says. “Our knobs go up to 11.”

Mr Mason dismisses speculation that Tesco’s most daring foray of the past decade is turning into failure. He wants people to focus on the “exceptional” achievement of the past 12 months.

In the dozen countries where Tesco operates, it has always entered a market by taking over an existing business, Mr Mason says. Fresh & Easy is a new concept, based on the Tesco Express convenience stores In Britain, and from a standing start it operates 100 stores, each of about 10,000 sq ft, across Southern California, Arizona and Nevada.

While Fresh & Easy will not reach its original target of having 200 outlets by February 2009, Mr Mason expects to reach that goal by this time next year — that’s one new store every three or four days.

Whatever doubts analysts may have, they appear not to be shared by two of Tesco’s biggest rivals in America, Wal-Mart and Safeway. It seems that have seen enough and have responded to the threat with small-store formats of their own.

Nearly 600 Tesco staff played some part in setting up the business, including personnel managers flown out for three months last year to help with recruitment. They were easy to spot, coming in every Monday morning bright red from a weekend on the beach.

“Looking at the past year, you have to be deliriously happy,” Mr Mason says. “At the same time, we are absolutely focused on what we need to do for this business to be as absolutely successful as it can be.

“It has taken a bit longer to penetrate catchments around the stores than we thought it would [and] I think the reason is because this is the first mature market, well-served market, that we have opened into, so actually it’s not filling a vacuum and, therefore, has to earn its place. But as we go into the second year, we would expect to see unbelievably good like-for-like growth.”

Mr Mason, chief executive of Tesco’s operation in the United States, believes that one of the biggest problems of the past year has been a failure to make enough of Fresh & Easy’s price credentials. It claims to be 20 per cent cheaper than the average American supermarket, such as Ralphs or Albertsons, but it relies on an everyday low-price model rather than one-off specials, which can grab customers’ attention.

The emphasis on promotions is far stronger now. The array of fresh and chilled American and Hispanic foods, including breakfast burritos, carne asada and shrimp siu mai, still dominate a Fresh & Easy store. However, shoppers are greeted with specials as they walk through the door – After Eights are going for $2.99 a box in Manhattan Beach – as well as weekly offers, such as three apples or three pears for 98 cents. You could be forgiven for thinking that you had walked into an Aldi.

Mr Mason says: “There is a real difference between the way Fresh & Easy loyalists and secondary shoppers perceive us. The loyalists have worked out that Fresh & Easy is incredibly good value for money day-in, day-out. It’s a great deal for 52 weeks of the year. The ones who haven’t used it as much, it’s taken them longer to work that out, so we have got to use communication to accelerate that process and get them up the learning curve faster.”

The need for a change in emphasis stems from a high-profile three-month pause in the store opening programme in March. First revealed in a blog by Simon Uwins, Fresh & Easy’s marketing director, the move was taken as a clear sign that Tesco was struggling to read the market, despite years spent researching American shopping habits. The brake has also been put on a much-heralded move into Northern Californian cities, including San Francisco and Sacramento.

Mike Dennis, retail analyst at Piper Jaffray and a long-time sceptic of the Fresh & Easy story, reacted with a note questioning whether Tesco may decide to “head for the exit” and quit America, writing off £1 billion of losses and capital investment in the process.

Mr Mason reponds: “People can write what the hell they like, but my view is the best thing for us to be is prudent.

“With each of the businesses I’ve been involved in, whether it’s with Express, Extra, dot.com, Tesco Personal Finance, Fresh & Easy, you have a business plan and Tesco has a tendency to set very stretching targets. I don’t think any one of them has at first hit that plan, so what you do is adjust your original plan and adjust your original activities to bring the two back together, so ultimately you generate good returns and good returns for your shareholders.

“When something is going really well, like the store extensions in the UK, which are going phenomenally well, then you go as hard as you can.

“When things are not quite getting there, well, we slowed down our early rollout of dot.com ten years ago until we improved the operating model, as it wasn’t clear to see how you’d make money. Now if you think about how much money most people managed to lose because they didn’t do that, well I think it gives you a great insight into how Tesco manages these things.”

One look at the American media suggests that Mr Mason’s caution could be well-founded. British executives upset about the doom and gloom in newspapers on this side of the Atlantic would have turned pale at news in America last week covering housing foreclosures, credit card charges, airlines cutting routes and the financial perils faced by the country’s carmakers. In one small town east of San Francisco, 90 per cent of homeowners are in negative equity.

Mr Mason says: “The better we do, the faster we will go. If it proves to be hard yards, then we may have to go slower, but we will be opening stores all the time.

“The only difference it will make is that we become the fastest ramp-up in history – instead of absolutely the very, very fastest ramp-up in history.”

Q&A

If you could change one thing in the financial and commercial environment, what would it be?

The economic turmoil is obviously a difficult situation for everyone, but for Fresh & Easy, by offering great value and not compromising on quality, we are in a great place to offer customers a good deal

Who is or was your mentor?

There have been many influential people to me, especially at Tesco, but (Sir) Terry (Leahy), in particular, is a real mentor to me

Does money motivate you?

I’ve got seven kids, so absolutely.

Which business person do you most admire?

Not quite one person, but the Medici family of Florence

What was the most important event in your working life?

It has to be moving to LA, to start Fresh & Easy. It’s proving to be an amazing opportunity. Bringing Clubcard to the UK market comes a close second

What gadget must you have?

My BlackBerry

What does leadership mean to you?

To create a compelling vision and share it. To lead by example, motivate others and create a positive team-based culture where everyone is treated with respect

How do you relax?

Watching my kids play sports, re-learning golf and eating with my family

The bloggers’ view

“I have tried to like it. They just opened a new one in Palm Desert. With their robotic checkout stations … their stupid product selection … their employee-vacant aisles. Hmmmm … I always feel like I’ve entered some food twilight zone. Please don’t make me go back”

Jim Bob H (www.yelp.com)

“I actually like them better than Trader Joe’s. I like their prepared meals, a bit on the expensive side but very convenient. They have nothing but self-checkout, which was weird but it’s the future. At least they had someone to bag my stuff and gave me a $5 off $20 coupon”

Mr Hollywood D (www.yelp.com)

“These Fresh & Easy people are clearly lovers, dreamers, grocery store poets, obviously from Seattle or somewhere, where people still do manifest the almost Emersonian hope of locally grown fresh organic produce at prices your neighbors can afford. With a hint of tarragon”

Sandra Tsing Loh (www.scpr.org)

“The only time I would see myself shopping there is if most of the population was infected by some rage-inducing virus and I was one of few to survive and needed food”

Corazon R (www.yelp.com)

SPEAKER: Steve Meyer – Founder and CEO Mainstreet Pedicab
DATE: August 20 & 22, 2007
TOPIC: Peddling Your Way to Success – The Mainstreet Pedicab Story

Pedicabs are human-powered taxis seen in many of the major cities around the world. They work well for not only transporting people, but also for the delivery of food and merchandise.

In a world that is becoming overwhelmed with too many cars, pedicabs offer a green and sometimes romantic alternative. While they work best over short distances ranging from 2 to 10 blocks, they are fully capable of traversing much greater distances.

Steve Meyer didn’t invent the pedicab, but he is in the process of perfecting the marketplace for it. With multiple income streams and a loyal following, the pedicab industry is breaking into new territory.

Here is what it took for Steve Meyer to become one of the leading figures in the pedicab industry, and how Donald Trump had a hand in his success.

Speaker: Steve Meyer is the Founder and CEO of Mainstreet Pedicab in Broomfield and has worked most of his professional life self-employed, interspersed with periods of employment.

He attended the University of Colorado from 1972 trough 1979 getting both a BA in Environmental Biology and an MA in Economics. He spent more than a year of this time traveling in S. America, Asia, Europe and Africa.

For many years, Meyer worked in the real estate industry doing economic and market research for real estate developers. His interest in the redevelopment of downtown areas and his experiences in Asia were key factors in his development of Main Street Pedicabs. Main Street was founded in 1992 and is the largest manufacturer of this type of vehicle in N. America.

Regulation threatens a booming business with, er, a cyclical downturn

AP

A PEDICAB borrowed from a friend for a conference on pedestrianisation in 1990 got Steve Meyer pedalling what is now a fast-moving business. Hoping to liven up the often-deserted streets of downtown Denver, his hometown, he bought two of the bicycle taxis. But they did not work very well, so he started building what has since become the industry standard, with 21 gears, hydraulic brakes and so on. His firm, Main Street Pedicabs, now caters to rising demand both in America and abroad.

Alas, regulation in two of the biggest markets for pedicabs threatens to puncture Mr Meyer’s upbeat mood. Last month New York’s city council voted to impose onerous rules on the hitherto unregulated pedicab industry and to limit the number of pedicabs to 325. A protest prompted Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor, to veto the new rules, apparently out of entrepreneurial fellow feeling for the pedicab drivers, but the city council is likely to override his veto, perhaps as soon as next week.

Pedicabs first started operating in New York in the mid-1990s, but their numbers soared from around 100 to over 500 after they featured in an episode of Donald Trump’s business reality-television contest, “The Apprentice”, in 2004. For the sort of fit youngster who wants a flexible job—many drivers in New York are actors or students—it pays well: $300 on a good day, though typically half that. The cost of entry is low, perhaps $4,500, compared with $400,000 for a yellow-taxi medallion.

Pedicabs are under attack in London, too, where an estimated 400 operate. Transport for London, a regulatory body, is reviving its controversial claim that pedicabs should be regulated as “hackney carriages”, like the city’s black cabs. Chris Smallwood, chairman of the London Pedicab Operators Association and boss of Bugbugs, a 60-strong pedicab firm, says treating pedicabs like black cabs would impose unbearable costs on the industry. He has helped to draft an amendment to a bill now before the House of Lords that would introduce lighter pedicab regulations.

There is striking agreement between the pedicab trade groups in both London and New York that some sort of regulation is needed, not least to deter rogue operators. But current proposals seem to serve the interests of motor-taxi drivers, who want their rivals off the road.

The irritation is that pedicabs do not compete much with motor-taxis, say Messrs Meyer and Smallwood. Pedicab journeys tend to be the short trips that drivers of gas-guzzling taxis hate most. Pedicabs’ main competition is walking, says Mr Meyer, who points out that if New York’s 12,000 yellow cabs were replaced with pedicabs, “there would be a lot less congestion”. Here’s hoping that politicians on both sides of the Atlantic cast their votes for pedal power.

Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.