Queens travel food favorite Arepa Lady won’t be means to sell coffee when it moves into a new building in Jackson Heights — turns out a non-compete proviso from coffee hulk Starbucks bans any adjacent restaurants from offered java.
DNAinfo reports that a famed arepa restaurant from Maria “Arepa Lady” Cano wants to get a wine permit partly since they can’t sell any coffee or tea due to a Seattle-based corporation’s franchise with a property.
Sounds nuts — a mom-and-pop restaurant, with a menu commanded by a corporation! — yet putting clauses in leases to forestall a landlord from renting to a competing business happens frequently.
Cano’s son Alejandro Cano, who is perplexing to open a grill during 78-31 37th Avenue with his mother Nelly Klinger, says he didn’t see it as a interruption to opening in a location. The former travel transport was forced out of a strange brick-and-mortar after the building got slated to be razed, and it was some-more critical to find another plain space in a area than to sell coffee, Cano tells Eater.
“If a landlord has some-more than one blurb space available, he wouldn’t sell to someone else who sells arepas,” he says. “That’s normal.”
The menu during a new outpost will differently be a same, including a mythological arepas. Eater has reached out to Starbucks for comment.
Though it’s common for businesses to write in noncompete clauses in their leases, it’s not indispensably a fact that’s famous to a wider dining public. It’s a approach for businesses to make certain a landlord doesn’t franchise to dual tenants that offer a same service, yet many landlords wish to have a accumulation of options in their developments, anyway.
As an profession explains on Law360, a landlord would determine to giving a coffee emporium a noncompete proviso accurately for that reason:
[From] a unsentimental standpoint, another coffee emporium competence be demure to come to a plcae where it would face approach competition, and it competence be some-more essential for a landlord to yield shoppers with a some-more different reside mix.
A large business like Starbucks — that is a protected gamble for a landlord — has some-more negotiate energy when negotiating a franchise for clauses like this.
Occasionally though, things get some-more testy. In 2014, McDonald’s was sued for restraint Starbucks from opening in a selling core in Massachusetts. The quick food burger sequence had a noncompete proviso in a franchise that a association claimed prevented a Starbucks from joining, and a landlord wanted to supplement an outpost of a coffee chain.
For Cano’s purposes, all is chill. The new Arepa Lady doesn’t open until 11 a.m. anyway. “The landlord was adult front with it,” he says. “We’re looking for something in a area. That space is a unequivocally good space. That was the decision.”