Meet the Incredible NYC Snackman!
The A-train's one-man bodega! Plus! Summer Break!! Items of Interest!!!
Hello everyone,
Welcome to Issue #176 of CAFÉ ANNE!
We are nearing the end of HOT COMMIE SUMMER here in NYC, and it’s been a good one so far. Aside from my newsletter adventures which took me from City Island to Coney Island, I got to wander around Belle Harbor and Jersey City, discovered a secret colony in Sheepshead Bay, attended a chili crisp taste test, did a story reading at Young Ethels, attended book launches of varying interest, saw a super fun movie (Eddington) and the most godawful movie ever (Life of Chuck), toured the Intrepid (friend had free tix!), attended a few protests (I’ll never reveal which side I’m on!), celebrated the opening of the Downtown Brooklyn Lidl, enjoyed the amazing fried ice cream at Queens Night Market and made the usual trips to Beacon and Hyde Park for purposes of “enjoying” some “country” “air.” NYC! NYC!
And now it is time for my annual summer break. Every August, as long-time readers know, I head up to Selkirk Shores State Park on Lake Ontario, which features amazing views of the nearby nuclear power plant. I always return feeling super energized.
This year, alas, the park is closed for renovations (aka making it super bougie and jacking up the cabin rates). So the family is descending on an alternative destination recommended by my aunt—Hemlock Hall, a resort in the Adirondacks. People keep asking, “Isn’t hemlock a type of poison?” to which I say, “Yes, yes it is!”
In any case, this means no CAFÉ ANNE for the next two Mondays. But the September 8 issue is sure to be a doozy, one way or the other. Haha!
And to celebrate my possibly imminant demise, this week only I am offering an annual subscription to CAFÉ ANNE for $35. How often can you get a 30% discount on something you already enjoy for free? Don’t let this amazing opportunity pass you by.
Finally, huge dog-days-of-summer shoutouts to our newest paid subscribers Tim C. and Heidi A. along with Susan R. for her generous Venmo contribution. That’s enough $$$ for 29 mini fans from the street vendor on Court Street!
I am very excited for this week’s issue, of course. We’ve got an exclusive interview with the one and only NYC Snackman, plus some (possibly) delightful Items of Interest. Please enjoy.
Regards!
Anne
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Meet the Incredible NYC Snackman!!!
If you ride the A train, you've probably spotted him wheeling his hand truck through the subway cars, offering "The Best Snacks For Less!" Yes, Lorenzo Simmons—aka the "NYC Snackman"—is hard to miss. While there are plenty of folks selling treats on the train, Mr. Simmons’s act is next level. He's a walking bodega.
I met up with the Mr. Simmons last week, just outside the A train entrance on 125th Street in Harlem, where I conducted a little audit of his snack truck inventory.
His store on wheels currently offers the following:
-Five kinds of chips: Lay’s, Doritos, Pringles (Cheddar, Original, Sour Cream & Onion).
-Four kinds of cookies: Oreos, Pillsbury mini chocolate chip, Keebler Fudge Mini Stripes, Famous Amos.
-Three types of crackers: Goldfish, Ritz, and Cheez-It.
-Quaker Chewy Granola Bars: chocolate chip, peanut butter and dark chocolate chunk.
-Welch's Fruit Snacks: Mixed Fruit, Berries N’ Cherries, Island Fruits.
-Gushers, Cracker Jack, Snyder’s pretzels, Cheetos, Mini Slim Jims, Tic-Tacs, Trident gum, Skittles, Blow Pops and Chewy Dips.
-Poland Spring bottled water ("ice cold!").
The snacks, packaged in individual portions, are stacked high in colorful cartons fastened to the hand truck with bungee cords and packing tape.
"This thing is bigger than me," said Mr. Simmons, a 59-year-old minister who lives in Harlem. "I'm five-nine. This thing is like, six feet."
He’d arrived at the corner with his snack truck neatly wrapped in black plastic. If he doesn't keep the snacks under wraps while pushing it through the streets, he said, "People gonna want free snacks and everything."
He also pays careful attention to his own dress—a DIY uniform consisting of black cargo pants, Ugg boots, trucker’s cap and white T-shirt.
"The white shirt says this guy's clean—it's spotless!" he said. "According to the scripture, we gotta make sure everything is done like the Bible says, ‘in decency and order’. God wants us to look good. He doesn't want us to look all messed up. Because we are representatives of God."
And down the subway stairs he descended—bump-bump-bump—with his snack truck, taking care not to run anyone over with his 125-pound load.
Mr. Simmons buys his inventory from BJ’s Wholesale Club, paying 20 to 30 cents per snack before selling them on the train for $1 each. His overhead also includes subway fare, scotch tape for hanging signs and the occasional replacement wheel for his cart.
He works six days a week for eight to ten hours. While he asked me not to reveal how many snacks he sells on a typical day, I can say he earns enough to make a modest living.
"What's your favorite snack?" I asked as we waited on the train platform.
"My favorite snack?” I'm eating none of that stuff. It'll kill you!" he said.
“Cheetos," he admitted, when we finished laughing. "And my next one, Oreos, and then Lay's. And then Slim Jim. And then Pringles—cheddar. I don't like the green ones, and the original is just too original for me. I like the cheddar. I love cheese and I think I love cheese because my mother loved cheese."
"What's the best cheese?" I wondered.
He didn't hesitate. "American cheese!"
"I knew you'd say that!" I said.
The A train pulled in and Mr. Simmons wheeled his snack truck onto the last car. "My route is the A line," he said. "I've been working the A train forever."
The aisles on the 4 and 5 trains are too narrow for his snack truck, while the pole placement on the B and D lines makes it hard to maneuver. The E and F lines, meanwhile, offer few paying customers. The A train works because it’s wider than the others, he said. "And the people are also more receptive, since I've built connections with many of them over the years. And it serves more of the urban neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens.”
Mr. Simmons typically works the last three cars of the train because they are less crowded. And he generally sticks to a loop between two stations in Midtown Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights. This stretch generates the highest sales, and both stations allow him to transfer by crossing the platform rather than lugging his truck up and down the stairs.
It was lunch hour and the car was crowded with passengers dozing, reading, texting or plugged into headphones. Mr. Simmons made his way slowly down the aisle.
"Snack time, uh huh, it's snack time!" he called in a sing-song voice. “Any time is snack time! The N-Y-C Snackman is back with the best snacks for less!... ice water, one dollar!"
A man in long dreadlocks bought a bottle of water—a five-second transaction —and Mr. Simmons resumed his pitch. "Iiiiii got snacks! That's one dollar, dollar on the snacks!"
The best selling snacks, according to Mr. Simmons, are Famous Amos cookies, Welch's Fruit Snacks, Cheez-Its, Rice Krispy Treats and Gushers. (The last of which I'd never seen before but later learned are a chewy candy “that bursts open with a juicy, fruity center!")
Just about any snack will sell, said Mr. Simmons, but not everything sells fast enough to earn a spot on his truck. After many trials, he no longer carries peanuts, Nutri-Grain bars or Entenmann’s muffins. Tic-Tacs may be the next to go.
"What kind of snack would Jesus like the best?" I asked.
"Jesus would probably like a snack that I don't have," he said. "Something like unleavened pizza bread. No cheese, just the bread."
"That doesn't sound very good," I said.
"Well, that's our Lord," Mr. Simmons replied. "He don't want us to do things that are only pleasing to the flesh. You’ve got to nourish the spirit as well.”
Mr. Simmons wasn’t always the NYC Snackman. Growing up in Jamaica, Queens, his parents had him selling firecrackers around the neighborhood. "They were calling me Firecracker Boy," he said of the kids in the community. "That'd be the fourth grade."
He graduated to selling character balloons, then costume jewelry. Freshwater pearls were big in the 1980s, he recalls: "The real ones was expensive. I sold fake ones."
In the era of Walkmans and portable DVD players, he sold batteries on the A-train. He also enjoyed a long stint as a bike messenger—the only time he's ever held a conventional job. "The Lord, he always had me working for myself," said Mr. Simmons. "It's not like I can't get a job. It's not like I'm not capable. Because I'm very capable. I'm a very intelligent person. But I just don't—I don't want to!"
After an accident ended the bike messenger job, Mr. Simmons sold pirated movies on the street and subway under the name Big Lo Network. First VHS tapes, then DVDs. His top seller? “Shrek”.
Then, said Mr. Simmons, he gave his life to Christ and was filled with the Holy Spirit— which meant the end of his pirated movie business. He spent the next five years studying the Bible and volunteering at his congregation—the Church of God in Christ in the Bronx—supervising the kids’ summer lunch program and preaching.
In June 2019, he received another divine message. "He told me to go back to work," said Mr. Simmons. "I said, 'Okay,' but I didn't know what I was gonna do. I didn't have money to invest. And then a few weeks later, I got some money out of nowhere. It was an insurance check from long, long ago."
His wife Jasmine suggested selling water on the street. Mr. Simmons didn't have a better idea, so he invested his windfall in a shopping cart, two coolers and a freezer. Selling frozen water on 125th Street and singing his jingle through a small speaker, Mr. Simmons stood out from the other water hawkers. His initial stock of 50 bottles sold out several times a day, allowing him to invest in a larger cooler that carried 200 bottles, along with a bigger speaker and the hand truck.
When the weather turned cold, he pivoted to snacks. "I'm an opportunist, and you can't sell water in October," he said.
But business was slow on the streets. "It's a lot of competition up there—all of these stores," he said. "The best thing for businesses is the three Ls—location, location, location. So I figured, 'Let me go down into the subway!'"
And the NYC Snackman was born.
We'd taken the train all the way to Brooklyn. Mr. Simmons wheeled his snack truck off the train, across the platform and boarded the uptown A, where he sold a pack of fudge stripe cookies to an office worker and a bag of Doritos to a day laborer. A mom asked him to pose with her son. "It's brilliant!" she exclaimed. "He's a one-man vending machine!"
Mr. Simmons has plenty of competition selling snacks on the train—mainly migrant families from South America. "But nobody sells like this," he said. "You gotta be crazy to do this. That's me!"
While he’s yet to get a summons for selling on the train (an MTA rule violation), he’s had his share of underground adventures. Sometimes passengers want to pay for snacks with items other than money. "Clothes, drugs, liquor, deodorant—other snacks!" he said.
A more unsettling incident involved two young men demanding money. Mr. Simmons subdued one with pepper spray and the other ran away. "You’ve got to deal with things like a man," he said, "or the word will get around that the Snackman's a punk, that he can't handle himself, that you can take whatever you want to."
He often gives free snacks to folks who can't afford them, however. "It's good that you give to people who's less fortunate than you, because the Lord, he blesses that—he acknowledges the fact that you give to somebody who can't pay you," he said.
Once we reached 34th Street, Mr. Simmons asked me to use his phone to shoot a video of him selling on the train. His wife handles his social media and he hopes to attract more followers to his Instagram page as well as his YouTube channel, The Meek & Lowly Preacher, where he shares sermon videos.
His ultimate goal, after all, is to spread the Word of God, he said, and he offered his favorite scripture. "In the Bible, it's coming from the book of Saint Matthew—chapter four, verse four—and it's pertaining to the snacks, too," he said. "It is written, 'Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.’”
We’d made it back to Jay Street, my last stop with the NYC Snackman. Before we parted, Mr. Simmons had a question for me: "Who do you worship?"
"I'm a Buddhist!" I said.
"You're a Buddhist?" he said. "Well, let's pray before you leave."
We bowed our heads beside the snack truck, and Mr. Simmons offered a quick prayer:
"Lord God, Jesus Christ, we thank you for this fellowship. We ask, Lord God, that you bless the interviewer, bless the interviewee and bless those who receive this interview. Lord God, let everything be done in decency and order, according to your will. Have your way in your woman-servant, Sister Anne. In Jesus Christ's name we pray. Amen!"
"Amen!" I said.
What’s your favorite snack? Do you ever buy snacks on the train? And what should Mr. Simmons add to his snack truck selection? Leave a note in the comments!
ITEMS OF INTEREST
Search all text in NYC that appears in Google Street View
Inside the Last of the Private Co-op Dining Rooms
Zoo Seeks Unwanted Pets to Feed Its Lions and Tigers
Beautiful Photos of NYC Self-Storage Buildings
CAFÉ ANNE is a free weekly newsletter created by Brooklyn journalist Anne Kadet. Subscribe to get the latest issue every Monday.
Amazing evolution from firecrackers to freshwater pearls to Fritos - Snackman is a true NYC hustler! I was just reading how the majority of the candy sellers in the subway system are moms (with their infants) from central Ecuador. I wonder if there are informal territorial agreements between different vendors or if it's just a free for all. Snackman's offerings would be hard to compete with.
Have a nice vacation!
While you are on vacation we could continue Café Anne here in the comments if we feel we're missing out.