Wong clarified himself: Yes, the neighborhood had changed drastically. So had its taste for upmarket coffee. McNulty’s used to stock a fairly small selection; fancy beans, like French Roast Java, sold mostly during Christmas. Now their big sellers include Puerto Rican Yauco Selecto, which goes for $26 a pound. But demand has grown at just about the same rate as the rise in rent and the price of beans. And the Wongs have done little to innovate. McNulty’s had the same disheveled charm that it always did, from the beautiful Chinese tins that held tea leaves to the wall of rubber stamps they use to mark everything. It doesn’t sell coffee online. “We’re not way richer or poorer,” he insisted. “We’re about the same.” And this didn’t bother him.

I mulled the coffee shop’s if-it-ain’t-broke business plan as I walked up Hudson Street to Imperial Vintner, a liquor store that has been in the same skinny storefront for about 70 years. Its manager, Louis Walker, who has been there for the last 27 of them, was happy to reminisce about the old neighborhood (“We’re the only mom-and-pop left,” he said) before revealing that Imperial hasn’t changed much, either. It has also survived partly because its new neighbors happily pay a lot more for what it’s selling. “They like the good stuff,” Walker said, pointing to a bottle of Château Pétrus. It cost $2,000. “And it sells,” he said, smiling somewhat incredulously. I asked Walker why the store still looks so threadbare. It made sense 20 years ago, but didn’t Imperial want to entice its richer customers? He waved me off. “You make it yuppie, nobody will want to come,” Walker said, improbably. “They like the old-fashioned way.”

That’s when I realized that my hypothesis was precisely wrong. Perhaps these small business survivors weren’t the smartest or fittest. They were run by unusually risk-averse businesspeople who sold a product whose value just happened to grow in lock step with the neighborhood. Michael Stewart, who co-owns Tavern on Jane, put it more bluntly. He’s surviving, he said, because he’s not an especially ambitious businessman. Stewart’s sales have risen over the past few years, but he takes home less money than he used to. He pays three times as much in rent as he did on his first lease, in 1995. Food costs more, too. “If I just cared about the money,” he said, “I’d have closed a long time ago.” Instead, he’ll remain open “as long as the place is covering the costs.”

A few blocks away, the eponymous owner of Arleen Bowman Boutique has followed the same strategy. Bowman has sold eclectic women’s clothes since 1987. In 2002, she signed her current lease (“I got in just under the wire!”), which ends next month. Now, she presumes that her landlord is looking for a big-label tenant. “You can’t compete,” she said. “For them, it’s not even real estate, it’s advertising.” I asked Bowman why she even bothers trying. The luxury brands don’t need to sell enough merchandise to cover the rent. They can write off some of the cost as image building. Regardless, five years ago she probably could have sold her lease to one of those brands — as other, more financially minded entrepreneurs in the area surely did — and cashed out. Bowman countered that closing her shop would be like shutting down her life. She’s currently looking at retail space nearby.

I wondered why Bowman, like her fellow proprietors, was disavowing economic theory and not trying to maximize her profits. Then I remembered one fascinating statistic about our economy. There are more than 27 million businesses in the United States. About a thousand are huge conglomerates seeking to increase profits. Another several thousand are small or medium-size companies seeking their big score. A vast majority, however, are what economists call lifestyle businesses. They are owned by people whose goal is to do what they like and to cover their nut. These surviving proprietors hadn’t merely been lucky. They loved their businesses so much that they found a way to hold on to them, even if it meant making bad business decisions. It’s a remarkable accomplishment in its own right.