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THE GREATEST STORE ON EARTH!My first name is Banner. I know it is a weird name…so maybe you can find my Mom and complain. Anyway, I live in New York City on Exchange Street. I am a bum. For months now I have been watching the traffic go by here on 42nd street. I can see right out of my front window…a small hole cut into the cardboard. You name it…cars, cabs, pedestrians…one huge continuous stream of traffic. It almost never stops. After so many years on the street, I guess you could call me a traffic expert.One day I was thinking to myself, that if I could somehow tap into that traffic and make a few bucks off of some of them I could stop being a bum! So…I racked my brain for a time, crawled out of my card board box and got up to stretch my legs and started wandering…just thinking about that traffic. After a while I came across a really nice specialty shop a block or so off the main street. No way anyone was gonna stumble across THIS store. I stared into the shop window. There were some really nice things there. I looked closer and saw that there was no one in the shop. I went inside. Even though I was a bum, the owner did not seem to mind. I guess he was thankful to have even ONE visitor. Anyway, I found out that his name was Mel. Sure enough there were bunches of nice things in the store…just no customers or even visitors, except me…a bum. So, on a whim I turned and said to Mel. "Hey, if I can get some visitors into your store and they buy something, will you give me a cut?" I asked him. Mel looked at me curiously and then shrugged. "Sure, why not…it’s free and it cannot HURT my sales," he said. Mel was a smart guy. It was FREE after all. We worked out the details. I mentioned to him that he should probably change his name from "Mel’s Store" to The Greatest Store on Earth!" Years of watching traffic go by taught me that you really needed something different to get the flow of traffic to take notice. He agreed and changed his sign about a week later. I left, scratching my head…trying to figure out a way to get customers for Mel. A few days later, in a back alley, I stumbled across a new printing company that just opened up. They were just now mounting the sign above their entrance. The sign read: "ACME Printing Company" I walked in. This company apparently specialized in printing decks of playing cards, among other things. When I walked out, even though I was a bum, I got them to agree to print up 1,000 cases of playing cards. Each case had 1,000 packs and each pack, of course, had 52 cards. So I was now the distributor of 52 million cards. But instead of ordinary playing cards, I got them to put their printing services advertisement on one side and Mel’s THE GREATEST STORE ON EARTH advertisement on the other side. I did not have to pay for these, of course, because we swung a deal. This new company needed to get their message out on the street. Even though I was a bum, they trusted me. I was the only bum that they knew—and it helped with me living on the street and all…where the traffic is. My idea was simple. I wanted people to show up in Mel’s store and buy things. I just wrote a short ad: "THE GREATEST STORE ON EARTH! 20% off with this card! I added the address and I was ready to go. My agreement with Mel was that he would give ME the 20% that the customer was saving as a referral fee. I could trust him, I knew. So I opened up a pack of cards and went to work. I started giving a card away to people who passed by. Sometimes I gave it to drivers of the cars and to cabbies. Most did not take them, some dropped them in the trash (I pulled them out) but a few put them in their pockets or on their dashboards. After a few days of doing this I was getting pretty bored. Occasionally I went back to Mel and asked him how it was going. Nothing yet. I figured that I would probably die of old age standing out on this corner giving away cards. But I kept at it. After I handed out exactly 200 packs of cards I checked back with Mel and he told me that 20 people had come into the store but only one had bought anything. He handed me a dollar since that one customer spent five bucks. Heck at this rate I wasn’t going anywhere! I guess I needed to do something different. Even though I was a bum I knew that this would work if I could just get more cards in circulation. If I could get 20 customers into the store after handing out 10,400 cards, then I could get twenty HUNDRED into the store if I could just get a million cards on the street. I put my hat on the sidewalk in front of my card board box and looked as desperate and pathetic as I could…hoping for a bit of change while I handed out the cards. The desperate and pathetic part was easy. After a while I had a bit of change, so I stuffed some card packs into the remaining pocket of my ratty old jacket and grabbed the subway to the Bowery. I knew lots of bums there. Once in the Bowery, I made my pitch and by the end of the day I had hired a bunch of bums to hand out cards. They knew me; we had a relationship, see…so they knew that I would take care of them when things started to improve if they ever did. Anyway, not only did I give them a bunch of cards…but a bunch of card packs too, and asked them to give a pack of cards to any bum they met and ask him to hand them out to the traffic that was passing by. Of course, they also gave these new bums a handful of packs to give out to the bums that THEY knew. I think you get the picture. I convinced the printer to give me another case since they also had one order from the cards but it was for a couple of hundred dollars. They were pretty happy. Now I had millions of cards to hand out and a bunch of bums doing most of the work for me. Pretty soon, you could not walk down a Manhattan street without some bum giving you a card telling you to go to the THE GREATEST STORE ON EARTH for 20% off or to visit the newest printing company in New York for 20% off. Some went, some did not. Some thought it was a bum steer. Anyway, after a few weeks I dropped by Mel’s store. There was a line to get in. The people in the line treated me like a bum and would not let me in …so I waited until closing time. A few hours later, Mel came out and gave me a hug, even though I was a bum. He asked me how I did it as he counted out a few hundred dollars in commissions into my hand. That was a lot of money for a bum. I explained to him about the card packs and my associates. He was impressed. Mel was getting pretty old and had been thinking of retiring anyway and so after six months of solid traffic and sales in the store, he surprised me by asking me to run the operation for him. So now I run the joint and Mel gets the 20%. I moved out of my card board box and into the store. Mel lives upstairs. With some of the extra money I made, I opened up a shelter for bums nearby. Not surprisingly, lots of bums show up there for the free food. A friend from the Bowery runs the shelter for me…and of course he does not let anyone eat until they have agreed to hand out these cards, see… I now have an army of bums on the streets of Manhattan getting the message about THE GREATEST STORE ON EARTH out to millions of people. I figure it is a pretty good system if even a bum can do it. Stop by any time, Banner The Greatest Store on Earth! Exchange Street New York, NY ****** Story by Mark Petersen-Overton. Why not join a FREE Banner Exchange where you can get an army of "bums" working for you? This FREE program is GUARANTEED to produce unlimited FREE advertising for you! Get your share of the market before the competition does! Join here, RIGHT NOW, it is FREE and HOT! http://www.BannersGoMLM.com/cgi-bin/ref/index.cgi?dist=profitstation
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