iPhone case Street vendors in New York show no mercy. Set up shop out front Apple stores for maximum profit.

In most circumstances I’d advise you to be extra leery and even outright avoid street vendors in large cities such as Chicago and New York. What often seem like nice and honest people are actually anything but, scamming gullible tourists and such out of their dollars in exchange for cheap crap. But every once in a while you find a diamond in the rough. Gear Diary writer Larry Greenberg found just that. It seems Larry shares a love that I myself am completely helpless to — we love phone cases. In his case (no pun intended), it’s for the iPhone while mine has since moved on to the Droid.

While a great deal of iPhone cases sold by Apple are at least a 6 on a 1-10 scale, you ultimately pay for the name and privilege of owning a small piece of the Apple name. But you don’t have to. Many do their shopping online as Apple sometimes has special deals on their online store. You can try 3rd channels both online and party brick and mortar with retailers such as Best Buy and other consumer electronics stores routinely offering their own sales and discounts. Or you can simply walk ten feet outside of an Apple store in Manhattan and find a rather organized and well kept street vendor with a boat load of cheap iPhone cases.

The vendor above was sitting outside of Apple’s new Manhattan store located on the upper-west side of the city. Apple obviously doesn’t like it because the vendor undercuts their prices by a considerable margin. The police aren’t too favorable either as it takes up space and street vendors on the whole have a rather negative image built up around them. But according to Larry, this guy was actually really nice and well kept, flaunting his street vendor badge giving him what seemed like god like powers to resist the powers of the police and Apple alike. Hey, if he’s making money and actually selling legit cases that aren’t crap, more power to him.

As Larry says: “Capitalism at it’s finest”. So true Larry, so true.