Robert L. Smith likes to joke. Once he was selling Real Change and a guy pulled up in a Maserati. Robert pretended the car was his to the next customer who came along. “If I can sell just one more paper, I can make my payment!” The customer told him she’d buy a paper when she came back out. But by the time she came out, the car was gone.
“What happened to your car?”
“They repossessed it! I couldn’t make my payment!”
Robert makes a point of saying, “I ain’t homeless. I ain’t hungry. Matter of fact, doing the papers keeps me from being that.” He works for a temp agency as a traffic flagger. When work slacks off, he has Real Change to fall back on.
Robert hopes that flagging can turn into a permanent job. He’s steadily building up his cumulative hours doing the work; another 125 or 150 and he’ll be able to get “supervisor” status and do flagging on bigger projects, such as on freeways.
Robert is originally from Detroit, but Seattle was closer to where his sister lives in Canada. “I got here in 1992 at 11:30 off the Greyhound bus. Through a temp service, I was working the next morning at 7:30.”
“I was mostly just a super laborer. But then on this one job, every employee on the site liked me, so they said, ‘Hire Robert, because we don’t got to babysit him.’ I see what’s got to be done and do it.” He had to have a flagger’s card. “They brought in one of the state people and gave the test right there on the job.” The temp service loaned him the $75 fee. He paid for the renewal by selling Real Change.
Besides keeping him going when flagging work falls off, extra income from Real Change has allowed Robert and his girlfriend to move out of their one-bedroom duplex into a two-story house in Federal Way. “Now I live in the suburbs! [If] my girlfriend gets mad at me, I go upstairs or downstairs or in the garage. She comes downstairs, I go upstairs. She goes upstairs, I go in the garage. [But] we get along most times.”
He likes selling Real Change. “I enjoy dealing with the people. There’s not a paper that I buy that I get stuck with.” He makes sales slogans: “Don’t be shy, support your Real Change vendor,” or “If you don’t read it, you can’t talk about it.” His latest is “Real Change, latest copy, collector’s item … guarantee the value will always decrease!”
He tells people that buying Real Change is not charity. A customer once asked him why he didn’t get a job. He told him, “Not only is selling the paper a job, it’s an investment,” since he has to buy papers before he can sell them. “Ever since that time, every time I see him, he gives me $10 worth of quarters! He understood.”