Panhandlers.......

Do you have many of them where you live? Do they annoy you?


I personally can't stand them. Its not that I don't want to help out someone who is down on their luck as I do help people often, but around where I live the type of people who panhandle are ridiculous.


Today is a nice sunny and warm (for winter) day. There is a pedestrian mall in the center of downtown which is a great place to walk around and hang out and on these days, you are guaranteed to be asked for spare change at least once every block you walk.

The type of people who ask for the change are generally aged 15 to 25, have a zillion tattoos and piercings and usually toting a pure bread dog. I hate generalizing, but its true. So what do they expect, someone like me to give them my spare change so they can go get another tattoo? I feel like telling each one of them that asks me this to get a job. There are plenty to be had in the area. I've told a few of them that they should consider putting their dogs up for adoption as if they aren't responsible enough to support themselves, I doubt they give their animals the proper care that they deserve.

I'm sure some of these folks have had a rough life and really do need the money, but from what I can tell, 95% of them are a bunch of lazy asses.

 

Here in Santa Cruz there are kids who still live with mommy and daddy but who go out on the mall all grundged out and spange the tourists.

there are also alot of "homeless" who get SSI ($800-900 a month) eat for free, get subsidesed housing, and fly signs all day.

don't get me wrong, alot of the people out there panhandleing don't fall into either catagory but a lot do.

I'm homeless myself but I'm usually lucky enough to find a job for the winter (rest of the year I travel, make most of my $ working for a carnival) and I know a lot of these guys personally.

 

Then again there's alot of people who've been out here (the road, the street) for a long log time who've never had to panhandle. If you use a little imagination you can always get by.

Hey dhs! You got change for a 9 dollar bill?

 

on my street there are some kids who panhandle.... and wear runners that cost around $200. Nuh-uh, sorry, I can barely afford to buy coffee these days.

 

yea, theres a bunch of them out in boston. i rarely give money to them.

 

I'm a lot more prone to kick down to somebody who seems ligetimately wacked out.

I've met homeless people who are so out there the thought of them going and getting help is a mute point--it's hard to find the soup kitchen if you don't know what planet you're on.

I'm not trying to make fun of these people, like I said these are the ones I'll help if I can. It pisses me off when someone's obviously incapable, through no fault of their own, of taking care of themselves but noone else is trying to help them either.

I've seen people eating some pretty vile shit out of garbage cans within a cpl blocks of the free feed just because, like I said, you can't get anywhere if you don't know where you are.

 

Where my parents live there's panhandling in the downtown area... I don't tend to give money to them if they're just sitting there with some random sign, not even paying attention to what's going on. But I do give people money if they're busking or something, because to me it seems more like they're earning it instead of just sitting around expecting it.

 

We have them all over south Florida. Here in West Palm Beach, they are at a lot of street corners, sometimes holding signs, sometimes not. I haven't seen what you all describe, the young kids at a mall with tattoos and dogs asking for money, though. The ones I see are in their 30s through maybe 50s or 60s. Plenty of them seem out of it, mentally, but then some of them seem like they would be fully capable of working some job somewhere, and I often wonder why they don't.

Well, I know why it is. These people, I have heard, make sometimes over $60 a day, possibly more. That's of course totally tax-free. Imagine you stand at a highway overpass where there's a stoplight. On a given day, thousands of cars pass by you. Many of them will be stopped at the light. If you encounter just 4,000 cars, and the people in just 1% of them give you a buck, that's $40.

-Jeffrey

 

There was a story about it a couple of years ago in Houston, some of them made more than $100,000 a year doing it... Like Jeffrey said, it's all about volume..

 

There's a woman in Toronto, the 'Sticker Lady,' she collects a ton of money, tells people it's for orphans, and then takes it home with her. the unfortunate thing is, stories like that keep people from helping out those who really need it.

 

yup. If anybody doubts this; try pulling up to one of these guys in a work truck and offerring him a day job for, say $10hr.
10 to 1 he'll say no because he's already making more than that standing there.
Like I said, I know alot of these guys.

 

new york city has a lot of panhandlers...here in pittsburgh there is no shortage of them...i don't mind them...what i hate is the swindlers. they follow you down the road w/ some retarded story about how they need money for a bus..offer em a bus ticket and they'll say they can't use it...they fuckin suck.

 

Last weekend me and my friend whent around town, he played his guitar and we both sang, we needed money for concert tickets because we can't get a job at the moment, our people (mothers) won't let us, because they don't want to see us succeed ... unfortunately only one person gave us money, and we succeeded in pissing off a wal-mart employee...

 

I gave 20 bucks to a woman with a stroller standing at the corner near starbucks with a stroller I pulled over today to talk to her and realized there wasn't a baby in the stroller-just blankets...yeah not too found of panhandlers right now

 

maybe she needed some thread for her blankets?

 

heh

 

I'm serious when I say that about half of the population of my town is homeless and panhandles. They have made a career out of that instead of trying to actually find a job. Actually, a lot of them don't even need money, they just do it because that's their "job". A lot of the time they are begging for friggin' pot! It is so annoying. I have no money to give them and the small amount I have to live on comes from doing meaningless work at a disgusting hotel.

 

exactly the day i gave that woman that i put my coffee on my credit card and I didn't even have enough in my account to draw out more cash (I live at home though with a mom who slips cash in my bag and has a sixth sense for knowing when I'm broke). but it pissed me off that she was decietful she shouldn't have pretended she had a baby.

 

In toronto, you can usually find one, or a group of em every block or so on the busier streets, usually young people with tattoos, piercings or middle aged men.

When i was in italy last summer, it was completely different. all the panhandlers were either (seemingly) single, young mothers usually holding a few children, or very old ladys.

 

In Italy, some young people actually dress up as old ladies and go beg for money, when they need some extra cash. Yeah, I wouldn't have believed it either, but one summer when I was in Rome, hanging out with these two local guys.. I was about to give some money for this old lady who was sitting in front of a fountain, looking really miserable, when the guys said that I shouldn't give her any money coz HE is faking it. I didn't believe them, so we sat there for a while and then when the old lady left we kinda followed her to some street corner where she changed her clothes and indeed, SHE was actually a healthy looking young guy about my age. My friends told me that it's actually a pretty common thing young people do.