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A third of a pound of meat—Jesus, no wonder Dwayne’s sandwiches are so popular. With a third of a pound of meat—plus all the extra layers of cheese, toppings and vegetables Dwayne likes to throw on, all wrapped up in a freshly baked hero—you can feed a whole family, and at our store no one ever gets charged more than six dollars (usually more like five). Moreover, you get the added value of Dwayne’s performance. Dwayne likes to make sandwich-making sound like thunder, the way he karate-chops the paper off the roll, slams the refrigerator doors and tosses the serrated knife in the metal sink. His sandwiches look like if you launched them on the East River, they would fail to pass beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. Customers, unaware of the Pavlovian response he’s induced, pace back and forth, eyes abulge, peeking tippy-toe over the counter. They’re in a trance. By the time they get to the register they’ve lost the ability to speak and can barely mumble “Howmuchizzit?” Sometimes they don’t even get both feet out on the sidewalk before they start tearing off the sandwich paper and eating like grizzly bears, trying to stretch their jaws around that enormous bun. If I were from the neighborhood I’d live on Dwayne’s sandwiches, especially now that it’s wintertime and the price of everything is going up.

This is something I never noticed before: how much weather affects prices. We’re in the midst of New York’s coldest winter in a decade. There’s a city-wide shortage of long underwear and even, according to the newspaper, rats, which are being driven deeper underground. Since not just New York but the whole East Coast is frozen, the price of orange juice has nearly doubled, and dairy prices have shot up as well, which affects things like cheese and ice cream. This comes during a year in which New York food prices on the whole are going up by 9 percent, three times the rest of the nation. And there’s been yet another increase in the cigarette tax (by a dollar) and the city’s first property tax increase in ten years, by the largest margin ever. Renting an apartment in New York is also getting more expensive, by 8 percent, double the rest of the country. Meanwhile, wages in New York are actually falling, and for the first time in eight years the transit authority wants to raise the subway fare—by fifty cents, its largest increase in history. New York has always been a cruelly expensive city, no doubt, but even longtime New Yorkers say they’ve never seen anything like this. No, if I lived in Boerum Hill, I would definitely shop at our store.

OR WOULD I?

One day I go to the other deli on our block, a store known as Sonny’s. Sonny’s is a one-minute walk from us, so sometimes it feels like we’re competing with them. We’re not. Sonny’s owns the market in nondairy milk, sorbet and real cheese. They’re the deli for organic, local and handmade food. And whereas our store rarely receives more than a few customers per hour from the neighborhood’s young bohemian cohort, Sonny’s is always full of people who look like they’re on their way to a Weezer concert. The jealousy I experience is like a punch in the gut. The customers carry handbaskets overloaded with expensive groceries and are lost in a quiet state of purposeful browsing, so much so that the only noise is people bumping into each other to get in line. (“Oh, did I cut you?” “No, you go first!” “No, I insist—your basket is heavier.”)

Afterward I try to get Kay to go over to Sonny’s.

“For what?” she asks skeptically. “To see who?”

“Hipsters.”

“Hamsters? You mean from New Hampshire?” She refuses. We argue. I introduce her to sorbet, Havarti and fresh sourdough. She likes all three but remains unconvinced.

This is what Gab means by her mother’s business philosophy resembling her driving philosophy: as Kay sees it, if you have a strategy that works—a lane that gets you where you want to go—you stick with it. And what Kay knows is that Americans like a steady diet of soda, chips