Beggar Marketing

I’m a person that normally doesn’t use take bus, always I prefer by bike, car, train or just walk, but recently I’m using train so much, when I said so much it’s means every day, to go to work, back to home, go to school and back to home again.
In this real daily trip that I do, I’ve observed a modality that is increasing every day, of different ways and in different places, but especially on the train.
Seeing the ways of increasing, in my opinion this modality or habit deserves more attention by specialists groups, cause show a modality that is in a meteoric rise.
Another day, going to work in the morning, the train was crowded, there was a blind man begging, and I thought with myself: Just in the rush, that the train is extremely crowded and just now this person decides begging? Why now and not later?
The answer came quickly, when I was back to home at evening, time there’s less movement of people on the train, I could see a scene that impressed me, each station that the train stopped , a new beggar came, blinds, handicapped, a simple beggar, immigrant, homeless, unemployed, etc.
Since this day I started to observe this type of action with more attention and I could see that each person have your own script, there is simplest to the most prepared, they have strategic places to stay, media devices, emotional appeal and are very creative. Some of them caught my attention:
There was a time when it was just walk by train with hands outstretched, but today’s this don’t have the same results, see some example that get my attention.
The most interesting and surprising that I saw was on the bus, I did not know there was this practice in bus too.
A boy with a child enters on the bus, asks permission to the driver and makes the following speech.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m here, humility, bagging for your collaboration, cause the cooking gas in my house ended, I’m unemployed and I live in east (PS: I was in the west), on the bus he received donations of a minimum 20 people, if really is true that he lives on east and came make him speech in many bus, certainly he just has money to buy the gas and stove! But the focus in this article isn’t mathematical, is only marketing.
Another case interesting on train was a old woman saying have cancer, unemployed, etc., crying a lot she begging, and asked for Goodness any help, coincidentally she got off the train at the same station that I, and we sat on the same bank, it’s ironic that in the exactly moment that she got off the train she stopped crying, her breathing returned to normal and she quietly count the money received.
To not to be a tedious read, I will cite only some parts of some cases.
I’ve seen: “Can you give me help cause I need make a job interview and I don’t have money to go”, “Someone help me cause I got out of jail now, because I killed my daughter’s rapist”, “Help me, I was evicted today”, “I have meningitis, labyrinthitis, pneumonia, stroke”, and also ask complains that no one gives help, and so on.
Beyond slogans: “better to ask than to steal”, “Could be you”, “an amount not to be missed”, “Can be anything”, “I accept transportation tickets / meal”, etc.
See, it’s a really promising market isn’t it, imagine what an analyst would say about it:
Speak loudly and confident, don’t stay only in the extremities of the carriage, look in the eyes of each one when ask, use appropriate clothing, involves the people with stories, use yours feeling.
Think about it, the evolution was so great that the famous “marreteiros (halkers)” had to improve yours methods to fight against this unfair competition, diversify products, make kind of theater like that : “two vendors enter on the same wagon , each one in a side of wagon and start selling with a normal price, for example R$3,00 or R$5,00, then one of the vendors says: “ Olha o RAPA!!!”(Security guards), we need sell all products! (Sell at lower price)”, so starts the sell about R$1,00 for example.
I thought this is very cool, and I’d like to share these experiences, even being funny, but still tragic.