I went to the shopping center north of town with my son today, and we noticed a man standing near the parking lot entrance with a large cardboard sign that said, “Will work for food.”
Then a large truck pulled up and blocked my view of him from the restaurant we were sitting in.
When we left, my son and I both did a double take. There was a man standing there holding that same cardboard sign, but it was not the man we first saw. It was like the first guy’s shift had ended or something.
Not exactly that but there are families who seem to have staked out certain corners here in Fresno and have someone on every left turn lane with signs.
I have seen it with gypsies in big cities that have an established gypsy begging population. Specifically, seen a van picking up the raggedy beggar ladies from the corner.
That’s pretty much what happened…the first guy’s shift ended. Panhandlers know that some locations will net bigger handouts than others, and they’ll reach agreements as to who gets what location at what time. This could be very friendly and cordial, it could be that the actual panhandler at the location has to pay a percentage to work there, or it could be that whoever is willing to physically defend his/her rights to panhandle at that location gets it.
Think of street prostitutes…sometimes their pimps defend their territory, and sometimes the girls work things out for themselves. But there’s money to be made in some locations and not in others.
We so rarely see panhandlers. You drive a half mile out of town, and it’s farm fields. I’m wondering if our town is “fresh meat,” so to speak – we’re not so jaded as to be completely unmoved. I saw lots of people stopping their cars and calling the first guy over, presumably to give him money.
I see this all the time. Wherever they have a regular spot, such as next to the freeway entrance, they all take turns and just reuse the signs. Sometimes you see old signs stuck in the bushes and they just grab one. It doesn’t really matter whether they use the same sign since they all say the same thing anyways.
I still remember the young lady in Chicago who was standing in the street bordering the blues district at 3am. She had on a perfectly layered set of clothes designed to look like something out of Oliver Twist complete with smudged face and cap.
Heh. I live in “The Metroplex”, which is the area covered by Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington, and a bunch of suburbs. Recently Dallas passed a law against these sort of panhandlers, the kind who stand at streetcorners, on the basis that it’s a traffic hazard and a danger to the panhandler himself. I think that Fort Worth did too. I live a block away from a freeway and a major road, and I used to see a guy stationed on every corner of that intersection…and they would change shifts, too.
We also have a lot of panhandlers that work various areas of the city, particularly parking lots. One of the newspaper columnists occasionally writes a column, giving descriptions of the more active panhandlers and their spiels.
Yeah, you’re fresh meat. Y’all are not jaded at all. When you can’t go to the grocery store without having to hear a sob story, you’ll toughen up.
Apparently in Portland certain locations are “claimed” by groups of pan handlers and there will be threats of violence if someone else shows up. I don’t understand why anyone gives people like that money.
I guess panhandling pays off more than having a local business pay you (minimum wage I’d reckon) to stand there with a big sign as a human billboard (we’ve got tons of people doing that here, but none of them ever look like panhandling types).
Recently I saw the rotating-shift guys near me who held a sign “will work for food”…while standing right in front of a car wash with a sign “Now Hiring”.
Apparently these guys are willing to work for food, but not for 6 bucks an hour.
I wonder if that’s because they are alchololics who can’t hold a job…or if panhandling nets them more than $6 per hour?
In my city, in a good location, a panhandler can make considerably more than six bucks an hour. Most people who give at all will give more than a dollar, so it only takes one donation of two bucks every 15 minutes to make eight bucks an hour. Around here, panhandlers often have their own spiels, which generally include a certain amount of money that they need to buy gas to get to their mother’s house (six bucks, or eight, or whatever), and while they usually don’t get the whole amount from one person, they will hit up several people in an hour.
They were rampant in El Paso a few years back, and would rotate around different locations around the city. Some were actually so well known, they were recognized all over. My daughter had one as a bank customer. I had one as a patient, and he had better health insurance than I did at the time.
My first education on this was about 15 years ago. I was approached by someone with a sign, “Will work for food”, asking for a few bucks. I told the guy, that I didn’t feel comfortable giving him cash, but since his sign said, that he would work for food, I offered to go get him a meal at Burger King, so he could have something to eat. He said that he would rather just have a couple of bucks. When I repeated my offer of a meal from Burger King, he told me to beat it, and leave him alone.
To answer the OP, it is common to see the shift change occur among pan handlers.
Back when I worked downtown, I was picking up a hot dog from a sidewalk cart on the corner of Wall Street and Broadway. Behind me was a woman panhandler squatting against a building.
As I was in line for my food, another panhandler, a guy, came up and started shaking his cup at the people in line.
The woman against the building got up and indignantly started berating the guy at length for “stealing her customers.” His response that it was a free sidewalk was apparently unpersuasive, as apparently she had some kind of an exclusive on the corner and all of the “customers” passing by.
In another context, I read an article (I forget where) that said that buskers in the New York City subway that have set themselves up in prime locations will often collect a payment to vacate their spot from the next musician wanting to use the space.
