By Della Hasselle
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — The city's scorching weather was responsible for more than just power outages and grumpy New Yorkers this week — small business sales also wilted during the record heat wave.
Yogry Haesan, a hot dog vendor who sells franks on the corner of 55th and 5th avenue, said business, like the weather, has been brutal.
“I’ve gone from selling 20 to five hot dogs a day,” Haesan, 35, said. “Nobody wants a hot dog when it’s this hot.”
The same is true of most businesses selling hot food items. The Soup Stop, a restaurant on 85th Street and Columbus, was without a single customer during lunchtime Thursday. Employees said it had been dead all week.
But the 103-degree misery didn't stop there.
Jamila Merrick, a hair stylist who lives and works on the Upper West Side, said that salons are the last things on people’s minds when the weather’s blazing.
“We do hair-do’s and people don’t want that in this heat,” Merrick, 25, said while sitting without a customer in Jean Louis David Salon on Broadway and 75th St.
“They don’t want to pay for a blow-dry when this humidity will make their hair go straight up anyway. It’s too much to deal with.”
If anything, she’ll get an occasional request to have hair “chopped off completely,” Merrick said, laughing.
Even tourist traps have felt the heat.
“People don’t want to come out shopping,” a Midtown souvenir shop owner Ali Abid, 39, said. “I guess they just want to go out to the beach.”
But not every business owner was bothered by the scorching hear.
One Midtown Bikram yogi actually saw attendance rise during the heat wave.
“You’re going to be hot either way,” Inwood resident and yoga studio manager Justin Quackenbush, 28, said about taking the “hot yoga,” where temperatures rise up to 110 degrees.
“When you step out of Bikram yoga, even this heat is actually a little refreshing.”
“Everybody’s different, I guess,” Quackenbush said, laughing.
