Wednesday, February 28, 2007


Do you want to read a good blog?
When one enters a store in an American shopping mall, it is common for some teenage salesperson to approach you. The line they give is something like “Can I help you find something?” “Can I show you our new collection?” I always try to sneak in quickly and settle into a section unnoticed. While I'm standing there, pretending to be deep in thought, in my periphery, I see a well glittered girl honing it on me. I think, “ah leave me alone! I just want to shop in peace, I can barely breathe in here and you're making it worse!!!” but I default to a simple “thanks, no” and shuffle on with the shame that I couldn't hide well enough.

I worked for 9 months in the take and bake pizza industry. When answering the phones, we had to recite three phrases, in one breath: “Thanks for calling Papa Murphy's on lakeway, this is Kyle, would you like to hear our specials?” After I mastered the line, I experimented with the intonation and word stress. I made music out of the passage, my voice could be affectionate, chummy, generous, or sometimes saccharine and completely joyful that I got to read the specials menu, again! We gave callers the choice between rejecting the person who would make their food or submitting to one more round of advertising in their day.

In Colombia, this idea of active selling is the standard. Colombians get offered numerous choices every day. The choices are usually presented in person, and that person is usually hollering.

Bus stops are the norm in most countries while in Bogota one can catch a bus at any point along the sidewalk. The diesel chimneys/busses rattle down the streets with a sign perched on their dash telling their route through certain neighborhoods and streets. They are over 20,000 of these privately owned “ejectivo” busses screaming around Bogota. They are all competing for customers, which makes for a madhouse of busses stopping and starting.

If I want to go anywhere, I walk out and start squinting at the signs going by. About half the time, the bus has passed me before I even know where it is going. When I see one I think is right, I wave my arm and it pulls over to get me.

This system favors convenience over efficiency because other vehicles must change lanes at the last second or stop behind the stopped busses. It's a terrible arrangement, but the service is unbeatable. I can walk outside and get a bus within 45 seconds. Again, nevermind how inefficient this is for the schedules of the two or forty other passengers.

On one of my first bus rides, I saw something odd. A guy came on, gave a nod to the driver, and started shouting some speech at us. I was puzzled, and I looked at the other passengers. Their expressions told me it was a customary event. The guy rattled on, something about his children and wife. At the end of his speech, he walked around and collected the equilvalent of three dollars, and quickly got off.

A little while later, a man with a basket hopped on the bus. He nodded to the driver and began handing out little toffees to each of the riders. I looked at the toffees in my hand, smirked, and almost snorted out loud. No one, I thought, would think about buying these candies.

Like the man before him, he launched into a pitch. Surely enough, at the end, he walked around to collect his toffees. To my surprise, a few of the riders handed money back. I pondered this event for a sec but shrugged it off. I had been confident that no one would buy the candies. I ethnocentrically thought, “If one wanted candy, one would go buy it at a store. Clearly, that would be more efficient!” I tried to conclude that this was purely a move of sympathy. Toffees or not, some people would give money for any speech.

But the more buses I rode, the more sales I saw. Astrology cards, medicine books, stencils, there were about six categories of things that were circulated amonst the bus salesmen. I got used to it but I shrugged it off.

During the following weeks, I noticed more instances of this type of direct selling. In the streets venders yell their pitches, whether it be “llamas!”(cell phone) or “chicharron” (pork fat). Men stand in front of restaurants and attempt to lead people into their restaurants. In traffic, men walk through and put maps against the windows of the waiting cars. When the light changes, they race through to pick up their maps and the occasional thousand pesos. In a typical Latin American cliche, men ramble on megaphones in a nasalized voices, offered cds, shoes, toys, anything concievably made in China. It's almost tragic to watch a grown man, likely a father, running up and down the sidewalk saying “peliculas, musica, peliculas, musica....” I sometimes walk into the store out of pure sympathy.

When I watched those people eat their toffees, I marvelled at the peculiarity of this setup. I had never seen crappy little objects sold on a bus.

We do have similar setups and a few that are beloved. While one is watching a baseball game, one hears “Ice cold BEER, PEAnuts!!!” In some big cities, people wash windows at traffic lights. However, something was quite different to me about this. While I detest being followed or soliticited to, people here want to be offered something.

The golden rule for great inventions, it goes, is to create a need and then fulfill that need with an invention. We never really needed cell phones before, but I have lost friends for not having one before. There was a time when hair gel, automatic lawnmowers, or gps tracking didn't exist. Now these things are necessities to different degrees.

The toffees on the bus is possibly an example of creating a need. While I was sitting there with a handful of toffees, I became irritated that marketing had crept into one more part of my day. This disdain for salesman and advertising is likely shared by many Americans. I assumed that my fellows bus riders would feel the same. They weren't. The moving market was part of their day. The people who bought the toffees seemed to be thinking “oh! So that's what I had been wanting.”

It could be that people are born suckers. It could be that they watch less TV. It could be that unemployment is 13.6%. It could be that one can't find reasons in the differences.

Perhaps the culture of Latin America values being sold to. Maybe people here are more sympathetic to their impoverished fellow citizens. It's also possible that I can't possibly understand the reasons. I see the toffee salesman in the way I see someone approaching me in the mall.

There are some things that can't be rationalized on the spot. That's the only conclusion I can make. Its just part of the frustration of living abroad: not understanding and not being understood. Things like people don't understand my speech, just as I don't understand how they let dogs sleep wherever. I just try the line again, shrug and keep on enjoying.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

kinda of boring i didnt enjoy it