I see this sign up at alot of stores, and i don’t know what it means. I thought solicitation meant entice. Entice to do what? Entice who?
I believe it means you may not use the premises to solicit people (their customers) for your own business or cause such as handing out flyers or sales brochures, asking for donations etc without special permission. Girl Scout Crack, uhh, Cookie Dealers would be an example of just such an “exemption.”
It means “No Salespeople.” They don’t want people coming in and trying to sell them stuff. Same as when people put up the same sign on their houses: no magazine subscriptions, no insurance salesmen, no Girl Scout cookies, etc., etc.
You can’t go in there soliciting funds for a charity or a good cause or a scam, or handling out leaflets or flyers, or pretty much anything else that the storekeeper objects to. It’s not a free speech issue when property owners limit the use of their private property.
Because I know somebody is going to raise this:
What constitutes private property that can ban solicitation is a legal issue that has been greatly contested: malls have been construed as public areas in some places and not in others at various times, for example.
We used to have a “No Solicitors” sign in the door when I was a kid. It means, “If you’re a door-to-door salesman, don’t ring the bell cuz we ain’t buyin’.” Small children are exempt from this rule (if they come bearing cookies).
In Commonwealth countries at least “soliciting” is often a specific term meaning to entice to have paid sex, ie. the staff of an out of the way brothel, waiting patiently upstairs for the next customer might be breaking other laws, but they aren’t soliciting; however the one shoving her unfeasibly large breasts into your car window at the stop light is. Ironically, when the girls get charged with “soliciting”, they go to see a “solicitor” to defend them in court. It’s a weird language.
Now, the general term means to entice into any sort of business, from handing out flyers, right down to the business of bumming cigarettes. On Sydney trains, signs used to state: It is an offence to attempt to solicit money from any passenger. Go into pubs and you will often see notices saying Patrons soliciting money or cigarettes will be asked to leave.
Um, it means “no going in and selling stuff to customers”. Solicitation - selling. Like, door-to-door solicitation. It also means they don’t want unapproved charities setting up outside and hitting up customers.
It means, in a nutshell, “don’t come sell your crap/beg for money for starving monkeys in mongolia here”. We had one of these up on our door growing up.
Shit, I always thought “solicitors” were lawyers. Mark Twain wasn’t getting about being “divided by a common language”.
The whole Commonwealth really needs to work on the quality of its male prostitutes.
Solicitors are lawyers. They just don’t solicit. 
Now is probably not the time to tell you we’ve got a huge real estate company called HOOKER. In fact, in downtown Sydney there is a towering office block called HOOKER HOUSE.
[American tourist]Hey, Mildred. Lookit the name of this skyscraper! They sure are professional down here![/AT]
Most non-unionized places of business have a “no solicitation” policy in their employee handbooks. While this covers all solicitations, including the friendly ones we have come to know like selling girl scout cookies or raffle tickets for the fire department, the real reason for the policy is to keep non-employee union organizers off company property. The signs are reinforcing that the company does in fact have such a policy.
Uh, am I being whooshed? I know of at least two, huge, unionized chain stores that have “no soliciting” plastered about.
Plus, aren’t employers required by law to allow access to union organizers?
Were I an employer, I sure as hell wouldn’t let non-employees in where the don’t belong – organizers or not. Liability insurance is expensive.
Haven’t you been paying attention? It depends on whether or not THEY HAVE COOKIES!
I’ve always heard (on cop shows, etc.) that hookers are officially charged with “solicitation”. Now I understood that “No Soliciting” signs didn’t necessarily mean “Don’t be pimping your ho’s around here”, but I was still a bit confused when I moved here to South Carolina and one of the heated local elections was for the office of “Solicitor”. It seems that this is the equivalent of “District Attorney”. Before this I had never heard a lawyer/attorney/counselor called a solicitor. (Geographical info: Born and raised in Georgia, then Kentucky, and most recently Florida.)