A new NEVER THOUGHT OF post-IPOD-age cottage industry
You struggling actors or directors, writer. Want to make fifty dollars in two hours so you have time to kick back and work on your show biz career? A brand new BLACK SWAN* of an idea has just shown up in my head. A cottage industry you can do off a letterhead and business card, a telephone if you have a good CELL PHONE. SPYING on clerks in big stores with film to prove they were rude and obstreperous. Film you can show to the boss.
*Nassim Taleb, author of Black Swan defines Black Swans ideas or "events (such as the rise of the Internet or the fall of LTCM) rare and consequential but also predictable only in retrospect. We never see them coming, but we have no trouble concocting post hoc explanations for why they should have been obvious." The idea is to PROFIT off them. Be the first.
Guaranteed that new industries will show up soon, black swan ideas, predicated on these portable camera/ sound recorders that we all carry with us. Someone will think of this SPY BUSTER career soon. You be the first in your city
If you live in a city with many department stores, you can be a SPY SHOPPER. You bust bad employees at all shops. Do it for hours. Provoke people. Sound like a reality tv show? Yes and that's perfect for a show biz person. It's especially perfect for someone who is homely, gawky, rude, angry, the kind that clerks usually act out on.
You maybe hire a few gawky people to work for you, but the executive has to be smooth and a good salesman as the executive goes into the Department store to pitch the idea. All you need to start up a business with a letter head. Your stationery reads "spy shoppers." LOGO is a small camera or IPOD in a hand. You need a photograph of a person holding a clutch bag and in the folds of it, an innocuous looking IPOD, which shows how a woman could hold her 'clutch' up at shoulder height while talking to a clerk and get away with some serious spying.
The concept is...."Should this kind of hired help even be hired? When they're not helpful?" Rude people will be detected. Have an elegant biz card of two women talking, one with a cell phone.
If you want to start up by yourself, no gawky employees, then you just have to be a conversationally strong person and have a recorder phone. Or some new high spy tech gizmo.
Get your cell phone put on a fine suit and let's wheel this baby out and see if it flies.. Make an appt with head of security at dept store. Go in with the TEXT we give here on a PROMO PAMPHLET.
"Sir, I will detect your most rude sales people. I will bring you photographic proof that you can download for your personnel files. In case one day you want to fire them, there's proof.
Or, if you do want to make a clean sweep of ineffective sales people, the films I shoot would show you.
I charge 35$ the hr that I am in your store. etc. And I can clock in if you want. You have a time clock for your employees. I'll use it.
If we gauge the temperament the spy would need, I'd say that this is
a job that young actors, directors or filmmakers could do..... One must
be conversational, curious and be able to pretend to himself that he's
running a reality show on TV, a CANDID CAMERA kind of deal. Call yourself:
CANDID CAMERA or SPY SHOPPERS or SNOOP SHOPPERS or
PPP for PROVOCATIVE PHONY PATRONS
RAT SQUAD...that's cute.
FINKS or FINK SQUAD
and if Asian, CHINK FINKS
For inspiration, Hit the local SPY equipment STORE, look at their merchandise.
Maybe the best way is a lapel camera. These may be digital these
days and have sound. Or maybe you'll find an outfit that will entail wearing
a wire and having a tape recorder in your hip pocket and the camera in
your hat brim.
As a promotion to pick up dept. store clients, create a bogus movie with a pal playing the rude clerk. Show this film to the store owner saying 'these are two actors, but it's the type of thing we're looking for.' Clerks that are on a power trip, who are snotty.
When you go into the Department store to promote your services, wear a LAPEL BUTTON that says "SMILE, you may be on RAT SQUAD TV." Obviously you don't wear it when you're at work. Unless you have a terrific sense of humor and after you've photographed the clerk for five minutes, you then FLASH the button.
Get a lotta old yentas who shop all day anyway, and send them out with lapel cameras to harass to try to provoke clerks.
I've NEVER HEARD OF THIS being done but it's a damn good idea. ESPECIALLY if you offer a special to the MACY's or Bergdorf personnel or security exec: "we do TWO HOURS a day of RAT SQUAD and do this 6 days, that is 12 hrs of work. Instead of 35$ an hour our special introductory fee would be $125 flat. A week of work, more actually.
THE TEAMs spread out over the city, each carries his spycamera or IPOD which will PHOTOGRAPH SOUND AND IMAGE, when wearer is holding it like a phone in his/her hand, facing the clerk. It will give you the lapel height video and hard copy also you read off the CLERK's NAME TAG, so you say "HI JANE, ..because the boss wants the names of the guilty, rude clerks and hour we shot them. SO it says JANE IN COSMETICS, TUESDAY JUNE 7, 04, 8 pm so they can check who Jane was in cosmetics. They show Jane the film and say Three infractions you're history."
EASY WORK, fun, it gets you out into the city. 2 hours at one dept store, two at another would be 100$ a day. That would take care of anybody's bottom line. If you make under 7k annually from a dept store they won't even take your social security number and you don't need to worry about W-2s.
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