| | | "Mike’s all right. He doesn’t do drugs. He’s a Vietnam Vet, an alcoholic, but you can talk to him. I meet all kinds of people. Hear all kinds of stories. I got a sister who’s homeless, so I can identify. I know some Sign Guys that carry a gun, but I don’t." | You drive by them all the time. They stand on the corners, endlessly spinning giant red arrows or waving fluorescent colored signs, urging you to Turn Here and Save $$$!!! Buy Diamonds Wholesale!!! Going Out Of Business Deals!!!
This effort to visually bust through your windshield, grab your attention and make you to pull over and buy more stuff is a time-honored American marketing tactic. Its roots go at least as far back as the Great Depression, when men turned their bodies into advertisements, strapping on "sandwich boards" to walk the streets, getting paid with a meal and maybe enough cash to sleep indoors that night.
But America is different now, right? Or maybe, as Zen Master Yogi Bera has observed, "It’s déjà vu. All over again!"
"Last month I was in San Antonio. Busy, busy. The K-Mart thing! Whew! I feel sorry for the people who worked in the stores, but this recession or whatever they call it is good for Sign Guys."
Joe Scopellite is a Sign Guy. When a retail business goes bankrupt, the courts allow liquidators to buy the store’s inventory. The liquidators hire a company like Main Street Promotions, who hires Joe Scopellite, who hires whoever he can find willing to stand on a corner and hold a sign for a few hours. The goal: sell off the inventory as fast as possible, for as much as possible.
Scopellite drove from Miami to San Diego in a horrifically abused 1983 Caprice Classic station wagon in two days. "I got a better car at home. I do. My cousin just gave this car to me as a gift. But it’s perfect. I just throw my signs in the back." Scopellite lowers his voice, "And frankly, some of the people I work with aren’t the cleanest, so you wouldn’t want to use a good car."
Sitting in the back seat of Scopellite’s station wagon is Eddy, a shaggy haired, middle-aged man with sun-browned skin and a stunned, wary expression. Eddy has just finished a 4 1/2-hour shift, standing on a corner in Mission Valley holding a sign proclaiming to Consumer America the death throes of Strouds Linens. Eddy is a Sign Walker.
Scopellite drives fast, muscles the big station wagon against other traffic, crossing lanes and threading the complex streets of Mission Valley like a native. "Fuck it. I’m an aggressive Florida driver. We got 40 of these Strouds stores on the West Coast. I’ll be in San Diego a couple, few more weeks maybe. My job is to do whatever it takes to keep my liquidators happy."
We pull up behind a battered grey Winnebago, parked somewhere on a littered side street behind a gas station. "This is where I live," Eddy says from the back seat. "I’m trying to sell it." Scopellite counts out $30.00 and hands it to Eddy, praising the man for doing a good job, for being reliable. Eddy agrees to work again tomorrow.
Now we’re barreling down I-5, heading to Mission Bay Park, where Scopellite often recruits his Sign Walkers. "What I pay the Walkers is different in every town. Depends on the cost of living, how the local economy is."
Like any successful small businessman, Scopellite is acutely aware of his costs.
"In New Hampshire I couldn’t get anybody. No labor pool! Finally I made up a sign and stood on the street, just to attract enough people for that job. Had to pay them $40 for a shift! In San Antonio, got people for $25. Here, I’m getting people at $30. I work on a flat fee. I get paid $1,300 a week for a job. All my expenses, labor, hotel, food, gas, everything--all comes out of that. A lot of other Sign Guys, they like to live big, come into town and rent cars, stay in $70 a night hotels. I’m at the Golden West in the Gaslamp. $130 a week. I don’t drink. Bought a television off the bulletin board for $50. I tell the other Sign Guys, ‘The Sign Guy who saves the most, makes the most.’ But they don’t get it."
In Mission Bay Park we walk along the picnic areas, looking for a guy named Mike–Scopellite’s main source for Sign Walkers. Scopellite says, "Mike’s all right. He doesn’t do drugs. He’s a Vietnam Vet, an alcoholic, but you can talk to him. I meet all kinds of people. Hear all kinds of stories. I got a sister who’s homeless, so I can identify. I know some Sign Guys that carry a gun, but I don’t."
We find Mike Johnson sitting in a lawn chair, smoking a cigarette and drinking a can of Cobra beer. Despite being homeless more often than not, Johnson has a job, and, as if to prove it, he hands me his business card. Johnson is a Senior Placement Specialist for SER Incorporated, an employment center on Damon Avenue.
"The city is trying to shut SER down. But they can’t. It isn’t their money. We’re federally funded. We get jobs for maybe 40, sometimes 60, people any given day. We give out the jobs by lottery. Every day."
Another man staying in the park, Gabriel Moreno, says, "At the employment center, you never know where you’re going, who you’re going with, what they’re going to ask you to do. You just get in their car. The deal is they pay you and feed you lunch. One guy drove me out to a mortuary, told me I just got to move flowers and boxes around. We get there, and there’s bodies all over the place. He wanted me to move the bodies. It’s like a chess game. I made him drive me back to the center."
It’s 4:30pm, shift-change time. Scopellite drives back to Mission Valley where he will pay the other Sign Walkers, throw their signs in the back of his station wagon, and give rides to those who need one.
On the corner near the Strouds Linens being liquidated we meet a large brown-skinned man standing with one of Scopellite’s signs. There is a boombox at his feet and he wears headphones. Scopellite holds the man’s sign so he can stand aside and speak with me. He smiles, but doesn’t take his headphones off.
I ask his name. He says, "You just call me Trinidad."
Trinidad tells me this is his first day as a Sign Walker, even though I remember seeing him doing it a week ago. When I ask to take his photograph he bursts into laughter. "What you want to take a photograph of me for? No way, man."
When I ask Trinidad if people in the passing cars ever say anything to him, he beams, "They like when I dance. They beep. Sometimes I just feel like dancing with the music. Was dancing two hours today."
Trinidad laughs. "In this business, man, you got to get people’s attention!" |
Sign Guys