As I stepped outside my local QFC on Rainier Avenue one evening last week, a Real Change vendor shouted angrily at a man getting into his car: “I damn well would if I could.” I approached the vendor, Vern, and he was visibly shaken. I asked him what the guy had said to him and he said, “He told me to get a real job.”
Just that morning, I had read an excellent thesis paper recently prepared by a former Real Change volunteer named Julia Raban about the experience of Real Change vendors (“Countering the Bare Humanity of Homelessness Through the Street Newspaper,” June 2015). In a chapter simply entitled “Work,” Raban describes what she calls the myth of the long-term vendor, “the idea that vendors who establish regular corners, a customer base, and support themselves by selling the paper over long periods of time are an example of the organization’s failure to act as a gateway to more profitable employment.”
As Raban explains, this myth assumes that it is a sign of individual and organizational failure when vendors are selling on the same street corner week after week, month after month, year after year. At Real Change, we believe just the opposite.
It is hard work to make it as a vendor. First, there is the fact that until you have an established customer base, it can be lonely and isolating. You get a lot more people who ignore, reject or deride you than you do those who smile, buy a paper and strike up conversation. You have to stand on your feet for hours at a time, often in the cold and rain. You have to invest your money to buy papers, contrary to the still pervasive assumption that they are free, with no way to recover your investment if you can’t sell them. It is little wonder that out of every 20 vendors who come in for orientation, only one is still selling the paper three months later.
That’s right, we have approximately a 95 percent attrition rate among new vendors. It’s super easy to become a Real Change vendor — we turn almost no one away — but super difficult to succeed. The vendors who succeed at building a customer base do so through hard work and perseverance. Long-term vendors love the flexibility of selling Real Change, the sense of community it provides and the fact that they work for themselves and can decide how much they need to earn.
So to criticize long-term vendors like Vernon, and by extension, Real Change for enabling them, is doing them and us a disservice. It is disrespectful to the time and effort they put in to succeed. It also ignores the reality that many people who sell Real Change are people who are excluded from the mainstream job market. This could be due to a range of factors. Maybe they are ex-felons. Maybe they have a checkered employment history because of addiction and substance abuse issues. Maybe they have mental and/or physical disabilities that make it hard to find or keep jobs. Or maybe, they simply don’t have an address or phone number that potential employers can use to contact them. Real Change is one of the only legal employment opportunities for many of our vendors.
Raban goes on to say that, “For homeless people, the idea that Real Change should be a stepping stone instead of a final destination is quite damaging.” I saw this in Vernon’s reaction to the guy who told him to get a real job. He was visibly upset and demoralized. Perhaps the most damaging thing that happens when people question the value of selling Real Change is that it reinforces the sense of internalized oppression, the slow process by which marginalized people absorb and accept the stereotypes and myths about them, that is already experienced by our vendors.
Please, offer some kind words of encouragement and recognition the next time you are out and come across a vendor who has been at this a long time.