Today in the city I fled from someone holding a clipboard. Spotting his name badge and the frenzied glint in his product-spruiking eyes I ducked into a home wares shop and hid behind the soup ladles. While stroking a Teflon spoon I mused upon what had just occurred. I had deliberately avoided a stranger in the street – before he had even spoken to me. Fearful of him trying to sell me something which would only cost ‘the equivalent of latte a week’ I waived the rules of basic human courtesy and treated him like Greenpeace-flogging leper. Even if he had spoken to me I might have feigned deafness, or told him to leave me in peace to eat my whale sandwich. Is it just me who is turning into a callous, rude pedestrian? Is my lack of politeness unjustified? No and no.
My reactions to people on the street are part of a wider social decay in our politeness to strangers. This change in attitudes is directly linked to our becoming both wary and weary of people who approach us without invitation in order to profit from our polite acceptance of their intrusion. The values and niceties that make Australians open and friendly with one another are being undermined, not by war or terror, but through that most insidious of weapons: Direct Marketing. Whether at home, at work, or wandering the city streets, nowhere is safe from someone offering you a ‘Great Deal’. Barely a day passes where we are not called during dinner/ hassled in the street/ sent unsolicited SMS’s and urged to change phone plans for cheaper printer cartridges which save whales and cost us $20 a month in perpetuity. Hordes of Spruikers stalk us everyday, turning a lunchtime stroll through the city into a Jonah Lomu-esque dodge, weave and sprint towards safety. Even answering the telephone becomes a gamble. A ringing phone becomes a loaded revolver, answering it a spin of the barrel, and thirty minutes of sales pitch a shot to the temple. That burning smell isn’t cordite – it’s your dinner on the stove. Even the someone-loves-me surprise of an SMS isn’t a booty call- it’s an ad for cheap mobile calls.
Naturally, this constant invasion of our personal spaces causes our attitudes towards strangers to harden. While initially our responses to spruikers are polite the persistence of hardened product-pushers eventually leads us to the walk-by ‘no thanks’ and finally to a state of callous indifference. In the later stages of spruiker-induced callousness people won’t even give others the time of day, in fear of presenting an opening for a spiel on Rolexes. Years of spruiker dodging have made the general public astonishingly distrustful. Even giving away free stuff is becoming difficult. During the Melbourne comedy festival offers of complementary tickets were often met with scepticism. The average punter seemed suspicious of anything ‘free’, as though upon entry to the show they would be presented with a comedian performing a 50 minute Amex ad. This fear of sales folk explains the massive popularity of Ipods. Headphone wearers, lost in their own deafening personal concert, are free to wander through life impervious to pitches, offers and the horns of oncoming traffic.
But how can reclaim our public and privates spaces so we are unafraid to walk the streets without the shield of an expensive Apple product? There is hope. The Government is instituting a No-Call register to limit telemarketing, curtailing our efforts to teach the finer points of Australian colloquialism to callers from the subcontinent. The register may well end the world’s only cultural exchange programme conducted exclusively in words of four letters. Yet while this is a start, the biggest problem facing opponents of Direct Marketing is that it is profitable. Somewhere in Australia there are legions of people who buy things on the street, over the phone, and from spam emails. An education programme must be instituted to end this foolishness. A concerted media campaign needs our support. It will be a tough fight, but if we band together we can do it, and initial budgets suggest a cost to us all of only a Latte a week.
For more on this comic go to Scott Steensma