There was a juice seller outside my office in the “Lands End” area of Bandra West in the then Bombay. Late evenings, cars used to be lined up literally all the way up to the end of land before Arabian Sea started. He used to have a couple of workers to deliver glasses of juice to the cars wherever they were parked. I don’t know if anyone kept a track of his sales volumes, cost, margin, etc., but it was rumored that he owned a couple of apartments in the tony Pali Hill area. This was in circa 1990.

Cue to the present day.

There’s a traveling streetside vendor who sells Idli and Vada in a couple of neighborhoods in Pune. I’m guessing his daily revenue is easily ?10K per day.

Then there’s this Samosa-Vada Pav streetside vendor in the Camp area of Pune. Like many of his ilk, he wraps his products in a newspaper. After eating them, many customers chuck the newspaper here and there. The few conscientous ones look for a trash can. I read somewhere that tax officials surveilled the bin and counted the number of sheets of disposed-off newspapers inside it. From that, they arrived at an estimate of sales, costs and profits. Apparently, the figures suggested that the seller made way more money than the minimum taxable income.