The papal visit to Philly should have been a windfall for businesses, restaurants, and retailers. Mayor Nutter and his band of government morons proceeded to create a war zone atmosphere in the city, scaring people away and creating an economic disaster for the city. This boob isn’t capable of running a lemonade stand, let alone a major city. His response was to blame the media for his miserable failure. I’m surprised he didn’t pull the race card. His reign as mayor has been a fiscal disaster. This is the cherry on the cake. Next up, another clueless democrat who will increase taxes and drive more businesses and people from this dying piece of shit metropolis.
Empty Cash Registers: Businesses Struggle Through Pope Visit
“We set up tables outside with grab-and-go items like sandwiches and snacks. When they didn’t sell, we started giving them to any homeless that would pass by,” shop owner says.
Restaurant owners say the expected crowds for the Papal weekend did not live up to the hype.
With as many as 1.5 million people estimated to have passed through Philadelphia during the week-long World Meeting of Families conference and papal visit, one would expect business was booming.
But all types of businesses, from restaurants and bars to clothing shops and even dollar stores in the city say they found it hard to make a buck during the pope’s visit.
“We have been suffering big time,” said Dollar-o-Mart Plus Dollar Store owner Asghar Ansari. “We stocked an additional $4,000 to $5,000 in product, like chargers, batteries and food items; things we thought people would need. But the only thing selling is the pope stuff.”
Several other business owners along Chestnut, Walnut and Samson Streets say they also stocked additional product in anticipation of large crowds of customers only to see it go to waste.
Mark DeNinno, owner of Chris’ Jazz Cafe at 1421 Samson Street, said he was left with mounds of extra produce that he had to ask his business neighbor The Union League of Philadelphia to store in their refrigerators and freezers when he ran out of space.
“We did maybe 10 percent of the amount of business we would normally do on a weekend,” DeNinno said. “There was a jumbotron right outside of our doors and thousands of people passed by but none of them came in. I think people just had an agenda to get from point A to point B without making stops.”
Philly Cupcake sales associate Silvia Pulido said they baked a lot of extra cupcakes that weren’t purchased. The store closed early Sunday after few customers stopped in.
Some stores like the CLC bookstore on Chestnut Street decided to close for the entire weekend. Others tried all sorts of measures, from making special orders to offering special menus and extended hours of operation — to no avail.
Nana Goldberg, owner of the I. Goldberg Army & Navy store, said her business placed special orders for additional Argentinian flags and ponchos, hoping visitors would need them, but it never rained and very few people stopped in to purchase flags or anything else.
“We did so many things to prepare and all of it seemed to go to waste,” Goldberg said. “Our biggest disappointment was that the weather is perfect for people to buy the items we sell, like flannels and jackets. We even have all of the country flags, but once Friday came it was a ghost town and no one was shopping.”
Being close to the action is usually a guarantee for additional business during an event as large as the papal visit. But even businesses as close as Reading Terminal Market say there was nothing lucky about the weekend’s events.
“It’s been terrible,” said Drew Shattuck, manager at Tommy DiNic’s. “We saw very few regulars or tourists. It was definitely not what we were expecting after the mayor told us to prepare for an additional million people.”
Michael Murray, co-owner of The Tubby Olive shop in Reading Terminal Market, called it a separation of business and church.
“I just don’t think the people were here for shops like ours. They were here for the pope, and that’s okay,” he said.
There were a few businesses, like Fergie’s Pub on Samson St., that said the papal visit didn’t have a negative impact at all.
“We had a solid weekend of business,” Fergie’s bartender Jim McNamara said. “I can’t complain.”
Milkboy also fared well this weekend. Server Renee Blitman says the location of the cafe had a lot to do with it.
“Fortunately, we’re in a good location because we’re right across the street from Jefferson Hospital. They had a lot of staff stuck in there over the weekend so we opened up early to accommodate them and we were packed,” Blitman said.
Who’s At Fault?
The consensus among some business owners is that the city put too many restrictions in place and scared away most of the city’s residents and businesses’ regular customers. JP Boles, owner The Ugly Moose in Manayunk, called the papal visit an absolute disaster for business owners.
“I’m calling it the aPOPEalypse. It’s not about making a profit off the pope, its really about maintaining your business and paying your bills. It certainly should not have been about scaring everybody away, but that’s what the city did,” Boles said.
Boles said there was nothing business owners could have done differently, but he did have a few recommendations for the city.
“I could have had Donald Trump bartending for me Friday and Saturday, it wouldn’t have made a difference; the people just weren’t there. If I were the city, I wouldn’t have started this whole thing by telling people to stay home, not to drive their cars. I wouldn’t have been as alarmist as they were, but it’s too late now.”
Stefan Sklaroff, owner of Cella Luxuria furniture store, mirrored Boles’ opinion. He said he was sad that the papal visit didn’t go as he expected.
“It’s not to say that we’re all about commerce, but you shouldn’t scare off the population in the fifth largest city in the country. And it’s sad because the pope and all of those people came here to see Philadelphia and I don’t think they really got to see Philadelphia,” he said.
“The pope’s message was inspiring; it was all about family. But in Philadelphia, it was like the family got kicked out of the house this weekend.”
So, what will businesses do with all of that extra product?
Pulido said Philly Cupcake owners still haven’t decided what to do with all of the leftover cupcakes that didn’t sell.
McNamar said he’s confident that the extra beer and bar food that Fergie’s ordered will sell, eventually.
DeNinno decided to turn the business fail into a charity opportunity by giving sandwiches away to the homeless. He says, the most important part of this weekend was not business, but spreading Pope Francis’ message of love and giving.
“We set up tables outside with grab-and-go items like sandwiches and snacks. When they didn’t sell, we started giving them to any homeless that would pass by,” he said.
“That’s what it’s all about. If just one percent of the people in the city pick up on the message of the pope, I’d say it’ll all have been worth it.”
NBC10 reached out to mayor’s office spokesman Mark McDonald but he declined to comment.
What a disgrace to see only $$$’s and totally disregard the life, death and resurrection of The Messiah, God’s Son.
Could it be the people are out of extra money. Perhaps we could print a trillion or two to speed up the economy. Lol
What was his message Anyway.
Robert,
How true.
Had, say, Billy Graham come to town there would be preaching of the Gospel and Baptism of the people willing to hear it.
The Pope, amidst great celebration and worldly glory, preached nothing from the Gospel and baptized no one in his celebrated appearances. Nor did he justify what he did preach to the masses by valid doctrine from the Bible.
Yet the final command given to every Christian, their leaders in particular, is to spread the Gospel throughout the world and baptize the nations, nothing else.
Catholics: You need to be careful who you follow and what your are being taught, don’t allow yourselves to be deceived in this era of great deception.
The pope’s message was: leave the border open, grant amnesty for all illegals, gay marriage is fine and tax the crap out of people to control the weather.
I wonder how much the city of Philadelphia spent on this debacle? Maybe they can send an itemized bill to the Vatican. Yeah, that should work.
Cost: $45 million was the fundraising goal for the event’s organizers at the Vatican-sponsored World Meeting of Families conference. Of that, $12 million will go to the city for policing, traffic and crowd control, fire and emergency medical response, emergency management, streets and sanitation. The state spent about $9 million in federal funding on National Guard personnel. The Secret Service didn’t break out its costs. The agency’s annual budget for National Special Security Events like this is $4.5 million.
No driving or parking: 25 miles of highways closed in the Philadelphia area; vehicles restricted from entering a 4.7-square mile area of the city; 591 vehicles towed out of the vehicle-free zone.
Law enforcement and public safety: 71 local, state and federal agencies; 300 pieces of heavy equipment; more than 6,000 National Guard soldiers and thousands of Philadelphia police officers and firefighters on duty.
Medical response: 423 cases treated at 10 first-aid stations, 129 of them resulted in hospitalization; 100 ambulances and more than 1,000 emergency medical personnel brought in.
Food and drink: 69,000 meals served to first responders; 250,000 bottles of water given out to pilgrims by Philadelphia-area convenience store chain Wawa.
Pilgrims get hungry waiting for hours to get past checkpoints to see Pope Francis in Philadelphia.
But those who haven’t packed granola bars or PB & J sandwiches either go hungry or have to have someone in their group jump out of line and buy something from a nearby shop. If they are able to do that.
For restaurant owners across the city, business has been hit or miss this weekend. That Pope Effect scenario everyone was expecting – the tremendous amount of business that was expected to be generated by the pontiff’s visit to Philadelphia – has panned out for only a few.
Across town, some businesses eventually shuttered and others are finding that even if they open, pope business has been abysmal.
“It’s been awful. It’s been our slowest weekend,” said Allison Lauria of Peddler’s Coffee, located at Spring and 21st streets and just a couple blocks off the Parkway. Her specialty coffee shop has been dead all weekend and on Sunday she and husband Rick Kessler decided to keep it closed.
That’s a far different scenario from the estimated hundreds of millions of dollars in business the pope’s visit to the city was expected to generate.
Marc Vetri, one of Philadelphia’s best-known chefs, articulated the exasperation of many restaurant owners when on Saturday he put a post on Facebook complaining about the significant effects of the security measures that were put into place. “We didn’t need to close every street, bridge and alley, scaring most people,” he wrote. “The goal was to give a shot of adrenaline into our economy, not hurt small and large business alike so they had to close.”
Tarek Albasti, owner of Aya’s Cafe near Logan Square, ordered extra inventory for his Mediterranean restaurant, needlessly as it turned out. Business has been at a standstill all weekend. Albasti – or Chef TK as locals call him – even geared up to spend the night at the restaurant with his staff to make sure it was prepared for the demand. Instead, nothing. No business, no patrons. The extra food and supplies is just sitting, waiting for the customers.
“It’s terrible,” he said. “I know there is a crowd. but we haven’t seen anyone,” he said Sunday.
At one point, hundreds filed past his restaurant, and even though he was standing outside with a makeshift coffee stand, no one stopped to buy.
Albasti says he feels trapped, as it’s nearly impossible to navigate this part of town.
With only a few hours before the Papal Mass was to begin, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims remained in checkpoint lines waiting to clear security.
Albasti blamed part of the problem with the fact that so many of the local residents left town – most, he said, scared away by the predictions that the city would be mayhem this weekend.
“We’ve lost 50, maybe 60 percent of business,” Chef TK said.
For many of the pilgrims, the only food around was what they brought in their backpacks.
Michael Jonas, who was waiting in line near Logan Square, settled for the fig cookies he had packed. He said he would have taken advantage of the shops along 21st Street on his way to the security checkpoint, but he couldn’t get out of line or negotiate the middle of line to get to the other side of the street to buy pizza at Logan Square Pizza Grill.
“If I was on the other side, I’d probably order 18 slices,” he said Sunday morning.
For some business owners, papal business was good.
Pete Kada, owner of Pete’s Famous Pizza, typically sells pizza only by the pie but this weekend was baking non-stop, selling it by the slice to the pilgrims. On Sunday, business was hopping as the line of pilgrims in the cattle chutes jumped out of line to buy his wares by the slice.
“We’ve hit an all-time record,” Kada said on Sunday as the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims waiting to clear the security points for the Ben Franklin Parkway filed past his shop.
Kada was ready for the demand: He ordered extra supplies, beer and sodas. Incidentally, he didn’t adjust prices too much. The beer was selling for the same price as always.
Iska gets it.
This “pope” is a secular leftist political hack wearing a costume.
Put a neegrow in charge and they’re going to fuck it up – what a pair Obama & Nutter.
The Pope is just a bunch of bullshit. Then he meets with bullshit leaders, and together they hope to elevate themselves with more bullshit.
None of these ‘events’ ever bring in the expected income for the economy – not the Olympics, not the All Star game (here in Mpls), not downtown sports stadiums.
Ah yes, everything is political these days….Religious Demagogues. No one could have seen this coming.
/snark on
This past Sunday at our small church (little over 100 peeps including all the kids), 1 person raised his hand to receive salvation after hearing a sermon focused on Jesus Christ. Bet that’s more than the pope had. How many total did he speak to? He must preaching a different message.
[img
[/img]
Pope Francis Helps Normalize Security & Police State in the U.S.
Largest security operation in U.S. history unlikely to hold that record for too long.
Ed Krayewski|Sep. 28, 2015 9:30 am
More than 800,000 pilgrims flocked to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway yesterday to watch Pope Francis celebrate Mass in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (the “Rocky” museum). They poured into security checkpoints that took hours to get through. They were prohibited from bringing in things like ammunition, explosives, firearms, and selfie sticks but also things like apples and other hard fruit, because of the potential for those things to be used as projectiles.
None of the pilgrims going through the checkpoints had any chance of being anywhere close enough to the pope to chuck an apple or a battery or anything else at him. Better safe than sorry, right? On MSNBC over the weekend, Chris Matthews gushed over how much “style” the Vatican’s own security detail had. He told the story of being able to see Bill Clinton walking through Lafayette Park (across the street from the White House) and how you used to be able to walk into Capitol Hill to see your Congressman, before “everything changed.”
That security deserves higher prioritization today than it did before 9/11 is a widely held belief that goes without scrutiny in some circles, including much of mainstream media. The pope’s visit to the United States could’ve been a powerful moment to challenge that orthodoxy. A man who puts his life into God’s hands could spurn the Secret Service’s. A pope who calls Christian gunmakers “hypocrites” could pump the brakes one driver of demand for firearms—the ever expanding theater of U.S. security services. Instead, the papal visit produced the largest security operation in U.S. history. Pilgrims got to test their faith not just with the journey to Philadelphia, but the journey through the checkpoint too.
My wife and I, who have been living in Philly for the last year and a half, drove down to West Philly yesterday to try to walk over to see the papal Mass. A national guard at one of the security checkpoints pointed to a man holding a Chinese flag about halfway between where we were and where the security check started. It had taken him an hour to get there, the guard said, so we went to a local restaurant to watch the Jets fail to get the Eagles to 0-3. The first one was closing because business had been so quiet. The second was open and we were the only patrons there the entire time. The bicyclists had a blast—many normally ride through the streets like there are no cars, but this time there actually weren’t. The streets were closed to vehicles for miles around where the Mass was being held.
Philadelphia’s city government got a lot of heat for scaring away potential tourists this weekend with their obsession for security. The city changed tacks earlier this summer, launching campaigns to encourage Philly residents and businesses to stick around for the papal visit. It was probably too little, too late. While some businesses expected a busy weekend—especially since the city government had noted the economic boon the papal visit would be—and stocked up accordingly, businesses that stayed open saw significant drops in sales this weekend. Pilgirms, apparently, came to Philly to see the pope not eat a cheesesteak. The street vendors selling Pope Francis- and Vatican-branded merchandise told me their sales were good and that the local police and other security agencies on the ground were leaving them alone. Even pilgrims want a souvenir to commemorate their trips.
The economic costs of the papal visit to Philadelphia—estimated by some to be equal to the losses incurred during Hurricane Sandy—will be what’s debated among Philly residents and what local politicians will be punished for if it gets that far with voters. It may not. Mayor Michael Nutter leaves office this year, and the election in November is expected to be a walk for the Democratic candidate in the majority Democrat city.
But no one will be punished electorally for allowing Philadelphia to be the ground zero for the largest security theater performance in U.S. history because, as Chris Matthews and so many other media personalities said this weekend, “everything changed,” Except it hasn’t. Abraham Lincoln’s assassination changed the course of U.S. history but didn’t lead to the creation of a security bubble around the presidency. Neither did Chester Arthur James Garfield* getting offed by someone looking for patronage, nor William McKinley’s assassination by a foreign-born anarchist “terrorist.”
The assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II in 1981 didn’t lead the pope to demand a tighter security bubble on future public trips. Instead he asked for people to pray for his would-be assassin. He met the man’s mother and sibling and even visited him in jail. In 2000 the pope asked the president of Italy to pardon the man who tried to kill him. To his credit, like John Paull II, Francis has eschewed a bulletproof popemobile. But he should be eschewing the larger security bubble that feeds a culture of fear, and the violence that breeds, as well.
Terrorists, anarchist, Islamist or otherwise, can only kill people and destroy property. They can’t change social and political norms. Only reactions to terrorism can do that. And they have been doing that. The pope, Philadelphia, the feds, the mainstream media, all of “us,” failed to take the opportunity of the papal visit to reverse that trend, instead contributing to the further normalization of the all-encompassing security state.
*Never forget.
[img
[/img]
robert h siddell jr says:
“What a disgrace to see only $$$’s and totally disregard the life, death and resurrection of The Messiah, God’s Son.”
Unfortunately these business owners and their employees need to navigate THIS life and that requires a job. Shutting down a city for the pope is bullshit. The pope is just one of many symbols designed to control the lives of human cattle. No different than our oligarchs and scumbag politicians. The real disgrace is the millions spent on this bullshit. The President of our own fucking country doesn’t even shut down cities to this degree.
Fuck the pope!
lol negro blaming others same ole same ole
I’d rather see the Dali Lama. At least he was chosen by God to be reincarnated instead of “selected” by a bunch of bead-squeezing pedophiles.
ESTIMATE OF 860.000 MAY BE OFF BY A SMIDGE
Crowd Safety Expert Estimates 80-140K Attended Papal Mass
September 29, 2015 1:24 PM
By Paul Kurtz
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — There’s no doubt that a huge crowd attended Sunday’s Papal Mass along the Ben Franklin Parkway, but city officials have yet to release a formal estimate. A crowd safety expert was able to give a partial crowd estimate.
Professor G. Keith Still of Manchester Metropolitan University in England did not have much to go on; a single newspaper photo of a chunk of the parkway and the Art Museum taken from the top of a nearby high-rise, but it was enough for him to estimate the crowd size in that space at between 80,000 and 140,000.
“I made the estimate based on the reasonable information that was available, based on observable crowd density and known crowd density based on those types of events.”
Still says there is a process involved with determining crowd size that most often takes place in the planning stage of a big event.
“What is the safe capacity? How do we get people in and out of these areas quickly, efficiently and safely and if anything goes wrong how do we manage any emergency situation in that environment?”
Still’s estimate may conflict with others but he says that’s no surprise.
“The numbers that the planners use, the numbers that the press might report and then the numbers the police might report because they have to justify resources.”