I was about five steps outside of my apartment building this morning when I was approached by a man who said something like, "excuse me kind sir, you seem like you have a kind heart," and a few other stupid introductory lines that I anticipated would lead to a punch line of "can I have some money." So I cut him off by saying, "are you asking for money. Are you asking me if I can give you some money? No I don't have any money to give you." I've lived in this city for 3 1/2 years now and at this point I really don't feel bad for a lot of the people who are asking for money and have sob stories. Virtually all of them are either lazy and simply do not want to work and expect people with money to simply hand it out to them.
I'd really like to play the following joke on somebody. You find someone that appears to be a beggar and is about to approach you to ask for money. And before they have a chance to ask you, you ask them if they can spare a quarter or $.10 to help you buy a Coca-Cola. I still don't have the balls to do this, but I will occasionally offer more than my curt "I don't have money sorry" and make a snide remark here and there.
one of the things that also really pisses me off about homeless people and particularly the panhandlers who simply ask for money as if they are entitled to your dollar bill or any change that is sitting in your pocket, is that everybody asks for money in one way or another, but almost nobody has approached me and asked for a job or work or offered their services in exchange for money.
on one occasion that I can remember, my friend and I were moving my couch from my old apartment up my new one, and we were struggling through the front door of the apartment building. A man was walking by and offered his services. He didn't strike me as someone who needed a buck, but instead just a friendly neighbor offering a helping hand. Well, by the time we got up to the fifth floor, his helping hand was outreached and he asked for money. This startled us as we wouldn’t have had him help if we knew he would ask for cash. I gave him two dollars for his 2 1/2 minutes of work. He scoffed and said "this can't even buy me a big Mac." so I ended up having to give him a few extra dollars, I'm guessing less for the big Mac and more for his malt beverage.
picky beggars are particularly funny -- the ones who ironically pay no heed to the adage "beggars can't be choosers". when I was in Chicago with Maddy, we of course went to get some deep dish pizza. I only ate three quarters of my personal pan pizza, and had the final slice put in a doggie bag. after seeing a few movies, Maddy and I decided to walk around Chicago and see the nightlife. as we descended some stairs, a man that looked perfectly happy and healthy pardoned us and asked if we had any money to spare. I said no, but I looked down at the pizza box and thought, I'm really not hungry and I'm probably just going to end up throwing this out. "here, you can have this pizza, I'm not going to eat it." He furrowed his brow and eyed the box, and asked "what kind is it?" As I open the box to show him the pizza. He looked at it and scrunched his face and said "oh I don't want that," as if it wasn't good enough for him. He left, and I turned to Maddy and said "that is exactly why I do not give money to anybody." What hungry person asking for money is going to turn down a slice of uneaten pizza? Well, someone who is not hungry, who is merely looking for some money so he can go and buy a drink or a lotto ticket or put the money into his savings account and 401(k).
a lot of people, good-natured people, believe that anybody that asks you for money or looks down on their luck, is hungry and can't find food. I do not believe it is possible to go hungry in New York City. On any given night, just after the big chains close up, you can easily find huge bags of uneaten bagels, doughnuts and that sort of food. I've passed this many times outside Dunkin' Donuts or Krispy Kreme's. And this of course is assuming you don't even have a dime to pay for a bite of food.
But I've never had someone ask for work. perhaps that is unreasonable. Why would anybody ask for a job on the street? Then again, when the hell did it become okay for random people to ask other random people for money to simply buy them things. I am certainly not knocking people who can't work, people who are particularly old, veterans, crazies, disabled people or otherwise handicapped people. But the vast majority of people who are asking me for money are able-bodied, under 40, and don't strike me as people who could not possibly hold a job. They strike me as people who are lazy.
What I'd like to do is put these people to work and see if any of them will actually work. I want to offer them jobs, low risk jobs at first, but jobs nonetheless just to test them and see if any of them are actually willing to do simple work, simple tasks in exchange for money. Unfortunately, I don't really have too many simple tasks that are low risk (i.e. I don't have to give them money to do them, like pick up my groceries or something like that). But I could certainly foresee a team who could be organized into laborers of some kind -- maybe movers, or painters.
Personally, one of the tasks that I'd like accomplished would be someone sitting on an MTA bus and jotting down "real" timetables of the bus. In other words, jot down the time and bus stop as the bus goes through its route. This could apply to subways as well. The whole point of this is to figure out more accurate timetables during certain times of the day and to analyze and interpolate this data to project more realistic schedules for buses and subways, rather than rely on the MTA's totally inaccurate timetables. I think this would be a pretty cool project, to recruit anybody that is asking for money and turn them into real workers.
But without ever even starting this task, I already know the outcome. The fact is, these people make more money in 20 minutes doing their song and dance on the subway than they would working a legitimate job for two hours. There is a ton of money in panhandling, and you don't have to pay taxes either.
for arguments sake, let's do a simple back of the envelope calculation of how much a typical panhandler makes a day. They walk onto the subway car and begin their introduction and entertainment routine -- a simple song, a simple poem, or just a cheesy, clichéd sob story about how they feel so bad for asking for money. This probably takes them between 30 seconds and one minute to complete, but let's say it takes them two minutes. then they walk around the subway car with a cup or a hat or an envelope or some other receptacle, expecting people to pay for the two minutes of bad entertainment. Based on my observations, the payout is obviously directly proportional to the value of the entertainment. A really good song or a really powerful performance, whatever it is, will get a lot more change and bills. Also, blacks seem to give more often, but this could just be because there are many more black panhandlers and races like to help each other out. I don’t know. (This is an OBSERVATION, not a judgment.)
So let's assume for a moment that this is a really bad entertainer and he or she only gets one or two handfuls of change -- maybe a dollar if they are lucky, but more like $.50. okay, so they get $.50 for about two or three minutes of work. That is on a low-end. On the high-end they probably get more like one or two dollars. $.50 for three minutes of work translates to roughly $10 an hour, and $80 per workday. For the medium-range panhandlers, that number can easily get up to about 200 to maybe even $300 a day, taking into account rush-hour traffic and tourists if they are hustling in the right places at the right times.
I don't know about you, but that sounds more like a salary than a handful of loose change. And this is why it bothers me when people give money to these people -- they're simply saying "yes, this is a great place to panhandle, since there are so many ready and willing people to pay you for your nonsense and feel bad for you and feel like they are making a difference in your life." In reality, panhandlers do have a job, and a pretty high paying job at that. They panhandle. They sell Bullshit and nonsense, and try to entertain by playing up to this unfounded notion that they are less fortunate than you simply because they are trying to make money on a subway and you make money in an office.
Which brings me back to the guy who approached me for money this morning. that evening, I was downstairs at the convenience store and who did I bump into, but the same guy. He didn't recognize me so we didn't really look at each other, but I did notice he was buying a lotto ticket. A fucking lotto ticket. That's what these people end up spending all their money on, lotto tickets, booze, and cigarettes. It sounds stereotypical, but there's a reason it’s a stereotype. Because virtually all of them drop all their ‘hard earned’ cash on crap that I wouldn’t spend a dime on (cigarettes or lotto, not alcohol, I don’t blame them for the alcohol). But cigarettes are expensive as hell!! My roommate pays maybe $30-$40/month for his addiction at $7/pack. Everyday I see the same people in my neighborhood buying the same crap at the convenience store and I've long stopped feeling sorry for them.
Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of homeless people who are down on their luck in less fortunate than myself. (oh yeah, and most of those panhandlers probably are not homeless either… that’s BS). And those people deserve help in one way or another. But I truly believe those legitimately asking for money for some food or whatever else make up a mere 1% of the usual suspects who are really ripping you off. And it is all those other people, the assholes who ask for you to buy their Chinese food because they don't feel like making that dollar and buying it themselves, who make it really hard to distinguish the people who actually deserve the money. So I never give money to anybody. Period. and I never feel bad about it.
Labels: bitching, subway
