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Hustles for dope | Forum
Dantalion
Sep 12 '21
I was thinking about all the creative ways I got money to fuel my heroin habit back in the day and one stood out in particular in making ungodly amounts of money. For about a month (while homeless), I flew a sign. You wouldn’t think that a 34 year old junkie wouldn’t make that much money tugging on the heartstrings of strangers but I was surprisingly successful. If your wondering how much money someone makes flying a sign, let me enlighten you. Now mind you, when I did it, it was in December of 2015, so this was around Christmas. And the areas I would frequent was around brick and mortar retail establishments so that has to be taken into account too, but on average I would make, in my estimate, about 80 bucks an hour, two hours a day. On Christmas Eve 2015, I made about 800 dollars CASH (not including the monstrous pile of free clothes and food I had next to me as I was working it) in a span of about 4 hours. Part of why I was so successful, as told to me by one of my patrons, was Facebook. People would take a picture of me all huddled up and shivering looking all nice and pouty face to their friends, and all their friends would rush to help me so that they can post that they too helped this lowly old homeless kid so that they can get the social credit brownie points. I had people slipping me 20s, 50s, envelopes of cash, free clothes (literally en entire wardrobe, multiple sleeping bags, piles of socks (some of the bags had cash receipts and I would return the items for cash), food, tents… That’s why when you see homeless people living in tents on the side of the road, they have a giant pile of clothes and trash piled up next to their camp. It’s INSANE. I did this until my pride finally got the best of me and I got a job. If your someone that has no pride whatsoever, and you just want to live off the charities of others, you can make a damned good living pretending to be homeless. So keep that in mind the next time you slip that homeless guy a 20 on the side of the road. They’re making BANK.
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Mod Baphomets
Sep 12 '21
I agree. Some dude, for years, even before the signs were a big thing outside of huge cities - in the 90s and early 2000s, that rode around in a wheelchair on all business days downtown begging and sometimes with a sign. Everyone knew him and would give him money. One day, he got busted and it made national news. Everyone was shocked to find out that he was not really handicapped. He worked it like a full time job and was found to have banked triple digits year after year, tax free.
The Forum post is edited by Baphomets Sep 12 '21
Cornelius Coburn
Sep 12 '21
I recall thinking about this a few decades ago. I was in a bind in my early twenties. I never flew a sign but a couple times I just plain out asked people for cash; being a bit selective. Once me and my girlfriend even went door-to-door trying to scrape up some cash, yeah we had a plan.
Anyway, the point I was going to make was that I concluded, at that time, that how profitable it was depended mostly on location. The folks in Danbury, CT just seemed so fucking nice it was unreal, as opposed to Bangor, ME, which was doable, but definitely not the same.
