When rain clouds hit Marc and Brad Quint outdoors and off guard, the brothers didn’t hail a cab or make a beeline for an office building. Instead, they hurried to pack up hot dog buns, condiments, and drinks, moving just a few feet to the shelter of an awning. A summer thunderstorm didn’t stop them from selling their wares—or trying to.

Street vendors like the Quints, who are in Baltimore, are popping up on corners in cities across the country, with city-inspected stainless-steel food carts in tow. At the end of last year and into this summer, applications for street-vending licenses shot up in Baltimore, said Alvin Gillard, Baltimore’s vendor board chairman. The city still hasn’t caught up with processing all of them.

“We see anywhere from 20 to 30 applications each meeting,” Gillard said of the board’s bimonthly review of vending hopefuls. “More folks have turned to street vending as a means to survive.”

Marc and Brad Quint are “The Beef Brothers,” according to their business cards, and their square of space downtown on Baltimore Street near Hopkins Plaza is one of about 55 locations assigned and licensed to vendors in the city as of June. They opened shop this summer and are selling bagels, muffins, sandwiches, and, of course, hot dogs.

But pinning down the exact number of vendors operating at any one point is difficult, said a city permit clerk. Not every location will turn a profit, and vendors may cut their losses and throw in the towel.

After losing his job as a cook a few months ago, George Aspras said selling hot dogs was the only work he could find. The return on his $5,000 food cart and hundreds of dollars for the permits and fees he needed to get started has been slow to come. Carts can cost anywhere from $1,500—used, from a friend—to close to $17,000.

Aspras said he sells about 50 to 70 hot dogs a day at $1.50 each. He also sells chicken kabobs, snacks, and drinks, and he wants to eventually offer breakfast. However, diversifying would require buying a more expensive cart with a grill and refrigeration.

Although Aspras said there is a lot of competition in the hot dog business, he’s not planning to give up.

“I’m barely making my bills, and I’m behind on some of them, to tell you the truth, but this is my way to make a living,” he said, stopping to sell a drink to a man who had hopped off a bus at the corner of Baltimore and Charles streets.

For Marc Quint, who came up with the idea to run a food cart after losing his construction job, the street-vending business was the perfect low-cost startup. The brothers’ goal is to own a small deli with a storefront, starting with moving their kiosk into an office-building lobby.

“We have a website with pictures of our customers, a Twitter account, a rewards program, catering,” said Brad Quint, who previously worked in marketing and public relations. “We’re not your typical street vendor.”

A typical street vendor is hard to define: He can be anyone from the Beef Brothers to George Aspras to Jerome Dyson Wright, who has been selling books near the Quints’ newly granted spot for decades. The board overseeing vendors was called the committee for “peddlers and hawkers” before a name change in 2005, Gillard said.

Wright, who is in his early 70s, is more of a writer and activist than street vendor, having authored several books in his lifetime. His most well-known is an autobiographical novel published in the 1970s, Poor, Black, and in Real Trouble. After its publication, he took to the streets to sell it by hand. This winter, the cold kept him indoors, and he used the time to finish his fourth book, Baltimore’s Pennsylvania Avenue Had It All.

Wright said business has been slow recently. Though he said he has sold thousands of books over the years, nowadays he manages only about 10 to 15 a day—and mostly not his own. But it’s not all about the money: He said he hopes one of the books by African American authors on the long table he sits behind every day from 8:30 a.m. to early evening will catch a troubled teenager’s eye and turn him or her onto reading. If you ask, he’ll give you a good schooling in civil rights history too.

Other old hands to the vending business include the co-owners of Cypriana Café, Maria Kaimakis and Vassos Yiannouris, who the Beef Brothers can look to for inspiration. The husband-and-wife team opened up a falafel cart in 1991, then they managed to build out a modest storefront by 1993. Now, the café has locations downtown and in West Baltimore.

Cypriana’s cart was reopened last summer under the banner “Baltimore’s Best Pit Beef” to supplement the couple’s restaurants, and Kaimakis now sells pit beef and lamb sandwiches there. She said the year hasn’t been without major challenges, explaining how she has been shuffled from corner to corner after the Residence Inn by Marriott and then MECU employees complained to the city about the cart blocking the sidewalk and emitting smoke from its grill.

“Just look at the foot traffic over there,” Kaimakis said, gesturing to the more-bustling corner across the street, near the MECU building, from which she was booted this spring.

The vending board doesn’t pick locations based on where a vendor will succeed, said Gillard. Instead, vendors are charged with creating a list of their top three picks, and the city’s job is to determine where vendors “fit in with the fabric of the neighborhood,” he said.

That means a vendor may be denied a space because the sidewalk is too narrow or the neighborhood caters more to sit-down eateries, he explained.

Of course, vendors often approach the vendor board or Gillard himself with questions, which he is glad to answer, as long as they don’t ask for location recommendations. That, Gillard said, would give some people an unfair advantage.

Vendors’ customers are grateful for their perseverance, citing cheap prices and convenience to their offices—plus the unmistakably local experience—as reasons they would choose a stand over the likes of a Subway chain sandwich shop.

“I wanted the local flavor,” said Georgia resident Gigi Magoulas, who was staying at the Residence Inn by Marriott. “[The pit beef] was just recommended to me by the guy who cut my hair.”

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Pino writes for the Baltimore Business Journal.