Archive for September 14th, 2008

It’s a perfectly good day to be out and about in the city. Your watch has just registered a little after 1pm, and the pavements are packed with office people out of their work zones and heading towards the nearest lunch restaurant. With your mind focused on your destination, you make your way through the hustle and bustle of the crowd, perhaps oblivious to everything but what’s infront of you, only taking note to worm your way around the incoming tide of bodies when - 

“Brother, buy a laptop.”

If you heard that sentence, nearly whispered, never shouted, and managed to both process and understand the implications of what was said in a split second, then congratulations, you’re a robot. For the rest of us non-logical thinkers, the oft casually intoned sentence offers up a business opportunity that is, at first appearences, simple, but carries with it significantly darker overtones.

It gets me everytime. The sentence is said, nay, murmured, my mind slowly registers someone speaking to me, yet my feet are still carrying me forward, oblivious to the offer. It’s usually after a few steps then does it occur to me that hey, I think that guy that I passed back there was trying to sell me a laptop. A few more steps, I slow down, and turn my head to look at mr laptop seller.

These guys are street smart, you have to hand it to them.

For one thing, they dress unremarkably. Not too flashy, not too scruffy, nothing that gives them away as a salesman of ‘opportunity’. You can find them always with a friend, and casual talk is exchanged between the two, often with a joke slipped in for good effect. To the unknowing eye, they could be just waiting for a friend before heading off for a tasty meal at the suva market. What betrays them however is their occassional focus of attention on certain types of people who regularly pass them. Young teenagers who dress well, businessmen hurrying to an appointment, casually dressed uni students who may have an interest in portable music players, these are the type of people who hold the seller’s interest most intimately.

When they’ve marked a potential buyer, they make sure they line themselves up when their target is heading towards them. Always on the side of the crowd, they never present themselves as a street hawker, and it is this pretence that keeps them (sometimes) invisible from the appropriate authorities. When said target walks pass them, their sales bid is casually spoken, as if they were yarning with an old acquintence.

“Hey brother, want to buy a phone?”

Why all this effort into looking as inconspicuous as possible? Most probably, it’s because the product on offer didn’t reach the street seller’s hands via a registered distributor

Stolen goods have two markets. The thief’s personal interest, and other people’s personal interest. Since said product is on the market, it’s obvious that other people’s interest takes precedence over the thief’s own, and hopefully will fetch a handy dollar, if they can make a sale as quickly and as drama-less as possible. Technically, while any product can be made ‘available’ to the public, the smaller and easily concealed ones are on display. Watches, iPods/mp3 players and mobile phones remain the most popular, with laptops a close third.

There was a story a few years ago that I can’t seem to find the link online, but it involved a street seller conning some poor victim out of his money by selling a laptop case filled with soap (or stones, can’t recall which one). The conman had convinced his target that the laptop case did indeed contain a laptop inside. How the case was never opened before the transaction was completed, we shall never know…