A Dog-Eat-Dog Business Decision
Soon Eddie Mannello will be out on the street. This might not be seen as too drastic a change, considering that he and his hot dog cart have spent the past nine years in the parking lot of the Home Depot in Thousand Oaks.
But to the legions who have dropped by the huge hardware store for a tube of caulk or a ton of lumber, Mannello’s exile will not be an event to relish.
“Everyone knows Eddie,” said Howard Lifton, a medical-supply salesman who drops by when he craves a hot dog experience as exalted as those in the Detroit of his youth. “He’s kind of an icon around here.”
Mannello’s is not your conventional grab-and-go hot dog stand. Under canvas umbrellas, he talks wine and fine cigars, trading stock tips and golfing disasters with longtime customers. As he loads sauerkraut onto a flown-in-from-New-York-City Sabrett’s hot dog, he also delivers his philosophy of living well, which can be described as taking virtuous action on a spectrum ranging from “relax” to “whatever.”
“I never had a plan,” he says. “I just let it flow.”
But certain phrases in the English language can dam the most free-flowing souls, and Mannello heard one of them last week: “It’s a business decision.”
That never means anything good. In this case, the decision was to not renew Mannello’s $1,000-a-month lease when the store on Ventu Park Road moves to larger quarters on Teller Road next month. Instead, the sole vending spot outside the new store was given to the operator of the latte stand that now sits near Mannello’s operation.
So that’s the way the sausage steams, right?
Not for Mannello’s fans.
“Hey, Eddie, is it a big-cigar day?” asks a woman slowly driving by, alluding to his habit of celebrating good days with a Fuentes Hemingway in the evening.
For Mannello, nearly all days are big-cigar days.
“I’m thankful every day, just for my being,” he says. “There hasn’t been one morning in nine years that I’ve woken up and gone, ‘Oh not this again. Not another day of work . . . ‘ “
When he talks about food, about his recipe for onion relish, about quality hot dogs, he grows animated. “It’s the natural casings--you know, they snap when you bite into them. There’s nothing like it!”
Customers have shared much with Mannello. He gives them stock tips--for a while, he posted signs with the daily ups and downs of an Internet stock he owned called e.Digital--and they’ve given him cigars, Hawaiian shirts, golf clubs. When his son had surgery for a tumor, customers brought him flowers.
But business decisions are business decisions. Jerry Shields, a spokesman for Home Depot, said the company decided to have just one vendor at the new store, but he wouldn’t say how the decision was made.
“It was a business decision,” he said.
For Mannello, it’s far from fatal. At 59, he is accustomed to life’s unpredictable twists.
A haircutter by training, he wound up running a restaurant in Beverly Hills called, naturally, Eddie’s Place. The brunch trade was brisk, especially on weekends, when a house painter with a magnificent voice came in to sing arias.
When soaring rents drove them out, he and his wife opened a ‘50s-style diner in Thousand Oaks. After eight years, it too shut down, a victim of the tough economy in the early ‘90s.
Mannello said Home Depot offered him a spot outside its Oxnard store but he has been reluctant to accept, scouting out street locations in Thousand Oaks instead.
“My customers are here,” he said. “This is home.”
A man came by and asked for a hot dog with ketchup.
Later, I asked Mannello what he thought of that.
He responded with a bemused tolerance borne of years serving the public’s hot dog needs.
“I get some people asking for mayonnaise,” he said. “Mayonnaise!”
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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.
