Miszczak’s Hamburgers : Poles Eager for Piece of Free Market

As usual, it was a frenetic morning in Warsaw’s infant hamburger business. Mikolaj Miszczak was up to his elbows in a tub of ground meat, trying to get the patties made. The griddle was empty. The customers were baying. Ursula, his wife and only waitress, was standing in the kitchen doorway, hands on hips.

“Every day it’s like this,” he said, dropping a load of meat the size of a basketball onto a tray and scooping out fistfuls to form into burgers. “I’m butcher, cook, farmer, truck driver, lawyer, accountant.”

“Ready, Mikolaj?” Ursula said.

“Coming,” he said.

The first burgers hit the griddle in a spatter of grease, and Ursula, relieved at this tangible sign of progress, turned to placate the customers, sitting at three tables and standing in a short line that extended to the doorway.

Veteran of Many Jobs

Miszczak is 27, a law school dropout and, like many young men and women of Poland, the veteran of a dozen brief jobs, mostly menial, in half a dozen West European and Scandinavian countries. Now, like thousands of others who are taking part in this country’s latest phenomenon, he has taken his modest grubstake and is trying his hand at private business.

It is stretching his energy, resources and cunning to the hilt, but for the moment Mike Miszczak, as his friends call him, can claim to be the proud if struggling owner of Warsaw’s first and only genuine hamburger joint. A year ago, even six months ago, it would have been impossible.

Since January, when Poland’s Communist government, under siege on all economic and political fronts, shoveled aside the worst of the bureaucratic muck that for years had blocked the roads to private enterprise, about 20,000 Poles in Warsaw alone have filed official notice that they are going into business for themselves.

No National Figures

No figures at the national level are readily available, but it is estimated that three or four times the Warsaw number have done the same elsewhere in this country, where the vast majority of 37 million citizens would like nothing better than to kiss communism goodby forever.

Most of these businesses are modest in the extreme--basement and garage operations, capitalism’s ground floor, where housewives with a copying machine sell photocopies to neighbors, or peddlers announce their intention to sell farm-fresh eggs at a kiosk or to do business as door-to-door salesmen.

But the range is vast, and even the most modest entrepreneurs harbor larger ambitions in a country where moribund state-run systems predominate, where the simplest goods and services are in short supply and where demand virtually always outstrips supply.

On the demand side, from toilet paper to carpet tacks--let alone the carpet--it is a wide-open market.

Piotr Kulesza, 28, has opened a shop renting out compact disc recordings. He has at least four competitors in Warsaw. Kulesza’s shop at the edge of downtown Warsaw is a block from Communist Party headquarters and, more helpfully, an equal distance from a ready market of students at Warsaw University.

This might seem an odd business in a Western country, but here, where the price (approximately $15) of compact disc recordings is in the luxury range, it makes good sense and a nice profit. For 1,500 Polish zlotys (about $3) a customer can rent a CD for two days. Or, for the same price, he can listen to it on headphones and use one of five tape cassette recorders to make a copy.

The doorways in residential districts of the city have become dotted with small signs advertising new businesses. In the view of some Poles, there is a sense of awakening, of a quickening of activity that seems to hum just beneath the crumbling surface of the city.

Economists argue that such small enterprises cannot pull Poland out of its economic mess, resolve its $39-billion foreign debt or provide an alternative source of income for the millions of Polish workers employed in antiquated and unprofitable heavy industries.

Can Point the Way

On the other hand, economic experts suggest, even these modest beginnings can point the way to the future. Along the way, the infant private sector helps to relieve some of the pressure of shortages and to provide additional jobs and income, most of it recycling into the system. It is, they say, like massaging the first tingling sensations of life into a paralyzed limb.

“Of course, I am an optimist,” said Waldemar Milik, who has set up business installing auto alarms in the basement garage of his mother’s house in a residential section of Warsaw.

“If I had no hope,” he said, “I would choose another solution. The fact that I am here means I have hope for the future. I think if someone is resourceful enough, it is possible to make it now. And any kind of private economic activity is preferable to working for the state. You have to work hard, but there is no difficulty in staying above the average income.”

Milik’s small operation is typical of many. It supports him and two employees, one full-time and one part-time. As with many such businessmen, his principal constraints are a lack of space to expand and a general wariness of Poland’s capricious tax laws, which, even though relaxed, still hit him for up to 50% of his profits.

He is part of a network of like-minded entrepreneurs. The outfit that supplies his car alarms, which he says are the equal of anything sold in the United States but sell for a quarter of the price, are manufactured in a garage in another neighborhood. The owner, Krysztof Celinski, and a partner make 5,000 of them a year and supply Milik and four other installers.

The alarm business almost takes care of itself and has helped finance research and development on another line, a device that measures the intensity of laser beams, a bit of electronic hardware that has important uses in industry.

Celinski’s partner is a neighbor, Andrzej Herman, and their nearly completed prototype, a refinement on an already available commercial model brought to them by a Canadian firm, has already resulted, they say, in 20 orders at 3.5 million zlotys each. Although that would be $7,000 at official exchange rates, in real market money it comes to about $1,000, which should make the device highly attractive to international buyers.

“Whatever you want to make in Poland,” he said, “you will find a demand for it. There is the problem of prices, however. You can go very high, because of the shortages on the market. But you can go too high and shut too many people out.”

At the new “Hamburger Bar,” Mike Miszczak, too, worries about prices--480 zlotys (just under a dollar) seems a lot, he thinks, for a Pole to have to pay for a hamburger. But prices in Poland are further complicated by the burgeoning free-market currency dealers, now licensed and legal and selling U.S. dollars for about 3,700 zlotys each. At this rate, 480 zlotys is about 20 cents, and that makes for a bargain anywhere. It is one of the complications of doing business in an economy like Poland’s.

But that’s only the beginning.

Miszczak’s day starts at 5 a.m. with a trip to the outskirts of Warsaw to pick up buns--specially made and a close approximation of an American-style hamburger bun, an item unheard of here, where the taste is for thick, dense bread. By 9 a.m. he has opened for business, and he works nonstop for the next 12 hours.

“Then,” he said, “I think.”

He has had a problem finding people to work for him. When he was setting up, he hired a waiter from a hotel restaurant. Miszczak wanted the waiter to stay--he was on vacation from the hotel--but the waiter demanded 500,000 zlotys a month, five times the average Polish worker’s wage. A woman Miszczak wanted to hire to help clean up turned down 250,000 a month.

So far, Miszczak’s meat supply has consisted of one cow and two pigs--his burgers are a beef-pork mixture--and this has required going out to the country to personally negotiate with a farmer, over vodka at 8 a.m., the price of the animals, which have been fed heavily just before slaughter to increase their weight. And there is the cost of the butcher and the grinding of the meat.

The grill in the shop is slow and takes eight meat patties at a time. Miszczak would like to serve them on paper plates, but these are of course nonexistent in Poland. He serves them on butcher paper, which is also hard to come by and, in fact, was sold to him “out the back door” of a state-run butcher shop. This is an example--one of many--of how state employees supplement their income.

Everything, Miszczak said, is an adventure, an exercise in uncertainty. Others involve the tax man, the landlord, the new problem of gasoline shortages.

But it is also exhilarating, for all its trouble, and Miszczak is full of ideas and plans for the times when, as he said, “I think.”

He thinks he might buy a small slaughterhouse--he knows one that is available--to eliminate his problem with the farmer.

He thinks maybe a pizza oven would be a good addition.

He thinks he knows where he can find the iron to make a better grill.

He thinks he should forget the pizza oven and stick to hamburgers.

Mostly, he thinks his place is too small. He thinks he needs to perfect the operation but that he can’t grow enough here. He thinks that what he would like is a really big place, up on Warsaw’s main drag, Marszalkowska, open 24 hours.

“I think that would be great,” he says.