Selling the Daily News for $1.25 was especially painful for one Bronx vendor.
A newspaper hawker outside the courthouse told The Post he was attacked by his distributor Tuesday morning when he complained that nobody wanted to pay the bloated new price for the Snooze.
Albayn Shabazz, 38, said that the distributor, Simbala Ducoure, hit him with his delivery truck shortly before 7 a.m., when Shabazz told him about the sluggish sales.
Ducoure was hauled in cuffs to the 44th Precinct station house, but was allowed to leave after filing an accident report.
Ducoure later admitted to The Post that the sky-high price is causing him huge headaches.
“A lot of people are complaining to my hawkers, saying $1.25 is too much,” said Ducoure, whose Daily News sales plummeted by 50 percent on Monday.
“They come to my hawkers, say, ‘Give me the Daily News’ and we say, ‘That’s $1.25.’ Then they say, ‘Oh, no!’ They say, ‘This is my last time’ or don’t buy it at all. All we can tell them is we can’t do anything about the price.”
The Daily News on Monday socked readers with a 66 percent price increase, from 75 cents to $1.25 in New York City.
It also raised the suburban price from $1 to $1.25 — a 25 percent hike.
Shabazz said he sold just 20 copies of the Daily News on Monday, and tried to explain it rationally to Ducoure.
“I promised [to Ducoure], ‘Jesus Christ could come down here right now, but at $1.25, he’ll lose customers, too.’ ”
Shabazz said Ducoure tried to run him over with his truck, but Ducoure denied being the aggressor.
He claimed Shabazz poured iced coffee on his Ford F-350 and then threw himself into the parked vehicle to feign being hit.
Shabazz said selling papers on the street corner is his only source of steady income, and he makes about $25 a day.
The worst part of the price hike, Shabazz said, is losing the extra quarter many customers used to tip him when the News was 75 cents.
Shabazz, who was treated for a sore neck and back at Lincoln Hospital, said, “People like me, hawkers, we work at the bottom of this industry. We suffer. We’re the ones paying the price and no one cares about us.”