Tourists few, NY gift shops struggle but don't lose (heart)

NEW YORK (AP) — In souvenir shops from Times Square to the World Trade Center, shelves full of T-shirts and trinkets still (heart) New York. But the proprietors wonder when their customers will, again.

The coronavirus pandemic has taken a voracious bite out of a slice of New York life as recognizable as a piece of pizza: the gifts-slash-luggage-and-sometimes-slash-electronics stores that dot tourist-friendly areas, offering Statue of Liberty figurines, toy taxis, NYPD ballcaps, Big Apple fridge magnets and anything and everything emblazoned with the famous “I (HEART) NY” logo. The memento markets are enough of a New York institution that a recent ”Saturday Night Live" skit was set in one.

Like the miniature-skyline snow globes they sell, the shops are a microcosm of a city that has thrived on drawing visitors from around the world and now is feeling their near-absence.

“It's a fight for survival,” Ali Zaidi said one recent morning at his shop two blocks from the World Trade Center. And with coronavirus cases rising and winter approaching, what would normally be the build-up to a busy holiday season instead is ”getting worse and worse, day by day."

Before the pandemic, his Broadway Gifts store generally got hundreds of customers a day — many tourists, but also local office workers looking for gloves, cell phone chargers or other practical items, he said. Now, with few out-of-town visitors and many locals still working from home, an average day might bring 25 to 50 people and $300 or less in sales, a small fraction of business as usual, says Zaidi, who has another souvenir store in midtown Manhattan.

After being closed for more than three months after the city shut down nonessential retail in March, Zaidi says he's used all the business' savings to keep it going, while getting some breaks from his...