The vendor a walk-up customer meets first
Retail and street vendors sell directly to individual customers, in person, no booking required. They work a fixed site, a repeating route, or roam without a fixed spot. This is the everyday shape of a cart, a stand, or a stall, and it is also the shape the platform's own vendor-location system was designed around in the first place: before anything else was built, this is the case it had to handle.
DRAFT This category comes from a working taxonomy checked against exactly one real case so far. Treat the framing as directionally right, not finished. See the taxonomy page for the full status.
Fixed site, route, or roving
The platform tracks a vendor's location fluidity separately from what they sell or who they sell to. Retail and street vendors can be any of the three:
Fixed site
The vendor works the same spot, day after day: a stand, a stall, a corner. Easiest case to describe precisely, and the one most people picture when they picture a street vendor.
Route
The vendor moves through a repeating set of stops on a known schedule, a cart or truck working the same neighborhood loop at roughly the same times.
Roving
No fixed spot and no fixed loop. The vendor moves where the customers are, which makes location the hardest of the three to describe precisely and the one most likely to change day to day.
A vendor's presence type does not say anything about their transaction type. A fixed-site stand and a roving cart can both be doing ordinary retail/street business; the two are independent facts about the same vendor.
A fact about paperwork, not a verdict about food
Most street vendors will not clear a formal certification bar. That is a fact about paperwork and participation in the formal economy, not a fact about whether the food is safe to eat. A permit and an inspection grade measure compliance at a point in time. They do not, and cannot, promise that nothing ever goes wrong in that kitchen, and their absence does not mean something is more likely to go wrong at that cart.
What certification tells you
Whether a vendor has filed the paperwork and passed the process a jurisdiction requires for formal food-business status. It is information: on file or not on file, current or not current.
What certification does not tell you
It is not a safety score, and its absence is not a warning. Certified kitchens still cause outbreaks; uncertified carts routinely operate incident-free for years. Neither status is a guarantee in either direction.
Food quality on this category is market-regulated, not platform-regulated: a bad vendor loses customers. The platform does not build a certification check of its own on top of that, and this page will not present certified and uncertified vendors as a safe side and a risky side. Listing here never depends on certification status.
One more fact worth carrying: most street vendors are women, and it is usually the same person who is the family's sole earner and its cook. A framing that treats certification status as a risk ranking does not just misstate the evidence. It stigmatizes the people doing this work.
Same vendor, two prices
The one real case studied so far is an elotero whose everyday business is exactly this category: a known route, walk-up customers, street pricing. When that same vendor was booked for a one-off private event, the price for an identical item was not the same number.
His quote for the gala used his everyday, honest street price, not an event price. That gap between an everyday retail price and a one-off booking price is the clearest evidence so far that a private-event booking is a different category from the retail/street business a vendor runs the rest of the time. See the catering page for that side of the same vendor's work. This comparison comes from one studied case; it is a directional signal, not a proven pattern.