Hobonomics

Begging is a secondary economy. Traditionally beggars are considered the poorest of the poor, but that’s not necessarily the case. The Real Canadian Superstore is a case for this. Every shopping cart in the Superstore parking lot requires a Canadian dollar coin to be unlocked. This is to strongly encourage would-be thieves to trade in the cart for the dollar. Bums have picked up on this, and have taken to hanging outside the store to beg for cash. Failing in that, they ask if they can take the cart back and keep the dollar. A dollar doesn’t sound like much, and it isn’t. Multiply that by ten carts an hour, and you’ve got a liveable wage. That’s pretty easy to do considering the traffic going through the store. Housewives, alone and with children, are the main customers at grocery stores, and they’re more vulnerable to “help” from a hobo who possibly might be carrying a knife on their person. In a way, it’s actually a valid service. If you have kids or a baby with you and you’re alone, you’d have to unpack the groceries in the vehicle first, and then head back to the cart corral to get your dollar back, and then walk back with your kids. That’s two extra chances for you and your loved ones to be run over by an S.U.V.. In the rain, it’s even worse. So if you set the goal at ten carts/dollars an hour, you’re actually low-balling your chances. You could probably find one cart every five minutes or so, or even three minutes in some cases. That’s $12-$20 an hour. That’s basically double what the people inside the store are making. Plus, if you’re begging for money as well, you up your profits. There’s no telling how much you could make. You could make an extra $5-$50 an hour on top of what you’re doing in charitable donations.

Compare that with the other money-making past-time for bums: collecting cans. To make a liveable wage, the average bum would have to collect around 4 million cans in a year, and the labour and travel are more involved and the competition is high. Seriously, though: working is for chumps. My comparison to Superstore employees is fairly apt. When I started there, they still had the same dollar per cart system, and I was only making $7.50 an hour, 20 hours a week and had to pay union fees and give up a huge chunk of my paycheque to the government. I would have been better off financially dressing in rags and collecting carts independently in their lot. It’s not like I wouldn’t be worrying about where my next meal might be coming from, or dealing the condescending attitudes from people about my place in society either way.

This is basically what I think of when bums come up to me and ask me for money to make me feel better. It’s obvious they have problems, but there’s no reason why they can’t apply themselves even in their deplorable positions. If the conditions were favourable, I should be asking them for money instead. Take that in your crack pipe and smoke it.