sandwich board

I could easily write about several other things I have been mulling over in my head lately, but today on my way to work, I was struck by something. I started to analyse the daily occurrence of people wearing sandwich boards, shoving flyers out into the crowd of the aforementioned joyless commuters of the ankle express.

If you don't work in Manhattan to experience this, it's pretty much the same thing that goes on when you visit Times Square or any other super touristy area. The hander-outers stand out in the blistering hot, beautifully temperate, or freezing cold weather (they mostly take the rainy days off, except for the totally hardcore) with a huge stack of fliers. If your eyes should even rest on the hand of the bearer or god forbid you've made eye contact, it's over. The flyer is stuck out for you at chest level and the person may even go so far as to make it physically inconvenient to pass them.

The flyers are for all manner of goods and services. Hair and nail salons with special discount offers, restaurant delivery menus, directions to a shoe warehouse or discount store, or Qi-gong massage place. But it's not the items and discounts provided that are the problem. Most of the time, they are items about which you've had at least some curiosity. The problem is in the timing and aggressive nature of the hander-outer.

You'll see the same people every single day, out there. There is a guy I used to walk past on 6th Ave., who handed out flyers for a discount men's suit location. I am, clearly, not a man, yet he tried every single day and even every single time I walked by, to get me to take one; 10 hours a day, everyday. I've walked by there a few times since my commute to work changed course and he's still there every single day, with the same look of futility all over his face. How much does he make to stand out there, arm outstretched and have his offering rejected every single day for 10 hours? What is the return on that investment for the store? How many people really take the flyers and then what is the subsequent business increase experienced? How do they track that to their miserable flyer-person?

The people standing out there on the sidewalk could be handing out bars of gold and I doubt interest would go up that much the first couple of days, because people simply look the other direction on most days, to avoid disappointing the hander-outer and having to endure again, the pleading look in his or her eyes.

I could have it all wrong, of course. It's entirely possible that these people have a booming business selling coke to businessmen, or doing social anthropology studies on large crowds of people dressed mostly in black. Whatever the explanation, they are out there day in and day out and I'm surprised some corporation hasn't picked them all up and given them jobs because of their dutiful execution of their mundane tasks. I mean, standing out there in that river everyday; that shit takes dedication.