29toLIFE

The man on the corner of 36th and 87th asked me to roll down my window this afternoon. He was holding flyers and I have a habit of collecting those, so down my window went. What he handed me wasn’t exactly a flyer, but a picture of his family. It was on a a decent quality postcard and laminated. Some of the club flyers on South Beach aren’t even printed this well. Underneath the image of his wife and two kids, it said something about needing money, etc., etc. The same kind of thing your average homeless person would write on a piece of cardboard with an old Sharpie. It was an interesting approach, but I’m not totally sure it worked to his advantage.

From what I could tell, he only had about ten of these postcards on him, and what he would do is wait for a red light, walk down the row of cars and hand out the flyers. Then, when he ran out of flyers, he would run all the way back to the front and walk back down the row, collecting all of his flyers and any dollar bills that might be coming with them.

Now, while I understand that seeing a man’s family might add a personal touch to his pleas and make a person more inclined to turn his/her wallet inside out, a person in need is still just a person in need. If someone is going to give money, they’re probably going to give it whether he has a picture to prove his situation or not. Likewise, if someone has no intentions of parting ways with their hard earned cash, his postcard isn’t likely to change that. At most, I have to figure he’s convincing an extra ten to twelve people a day.

And twelve more people donating money is great, until you figure that he’s running up to the same cars twice, essentially cutting his potential profits in half. Where he’s bringing in twelve new “customers”, he’s losing out on more than a hundred. Not a very shrewd business move, if you ask me. Couple that with the price of his high-gloss postcards and the probability that he’ll lose at least one or two throughout the day and you begin to realize just why he’s in this predicament in the first place. A financial wizard, he was clearly not.

As for me, my money stayed tucked in my wallet, which never even came close to leaving my pocket. I’m saving it for the guy with the plastic cup. At least I know he’ll waste it on beer. Not Kinko’s.