New York Times: Not Your Banks’ Bailouts: Stores Too Loved to Fail
BELOVED Ray Alvarez, owner of Ray’s Candy Store in the East Village, is deeply in debt, and young people are trying to help.
The bike store had become a wine bar. The new apartments were breathtakingly expensive. Then kids from the neighborhood formed a protective guard around a gnarly old candy store on Avenue A and Seventh Street in Manhattan.
For the last month, a group of high school and college students has been running volunteer deliveries on Saturday nights for Ray’s Candy Store, an all-night chapel of East Village life packed with fond, fervent and freakish memories, but not exactly jammed with customers. With their deliveries — need an egg cream and Belgian fries at 3 a.m.? — the kids hope to drum up business for Ray’s until the spring, when more people are walking the streets.
How do the delivery teams get around? “Skateboards,” Arianna Gil, 16, said. “Scooters, bike and feet. All will be utilized.”
Already, friends and neighbors have run two fund-raisers to help the candy store’s owner, Ray Alvarez, pay thousands of dollars in overdue bills; another is planned for Monday night at the Theater for the New City.
In the age of bailouts, it turns out that not all rescue operations involve numbers ending in “illions.” Read Story.
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March 3, 2010 – Coloradoan.com – USA
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February 12, 2010 – San Diego News Network – USA

