American Hawkers

This is a followup to my seemingly omnibus post about piracy. If you read that one skip the first paragraph.

Hawkers are people who sell goods on the street. Their stands range from a blanket on the ground to small tents with walls they can hang goods from. The goods range from food to clothing to watches to mobile accessories. They further range from the clearly legal (food) to the clearly not (knockoff Beats by Dre headphones) to the ambiguous (Levis shirts, perhaps used? perhaps knockoff?). The prices range from cheap to dirt cheap. Any street that people walk down has hawkers and the busier the street the more numerous the hawkers. At night our sidewalk turns into a narrow ribbon just wide enough to walk single file down that snakes between hawker stands on either side. Some of these hawker stands are officially sanctioned by the government, most are not.

Hawkers setting up in anticipation of the evening. It's still sparse this early.

Part of the reason the government doesn’t fuss with the non-sanctioned hawkers is they are the lifeblood of the economy for the, uh, less well-to-do. In other words, crack down on the hawkers and you crack down on the masses who might not take too kindly to it. Protests by well-to-do people, who are the minority, are slated to shut Bangkok down on Monday. Seriously, we’re supposed to stock up this week just in case it becomes imprudent to venture out for a few days. I can’t imagine what protests by the masses would do.

Spectra and I marvel at the omnipresence of hawkers and their borderline legality. It feels bizarre. A mixture of bygone pre-capitalism entrepreneurship and pre-law rabble rule but selling mobile phone accessories and knockoff Chanel shirts. Walking down those hawker streets feels foreign in the way I think many people (including myself) think places like Bangkok will feel. Alien. But a couple nights ago we were walking through a mall--it’s hard to avoid walking through malls--and Spectra made a point that stopped me cold. We were talking about hawkers when she said, “We have them back home too.”

I was confused. “We do?”

“Sure we do. Places selling at cut-rate prices hastily made stuff ‘inspired by’ vastly more expensive brands and designers? We don’t call them hawkers though. We call them Forever 21, Target, Uniqlo, Gap, H&M.”

She was right, of course. It’s the same dang thing. We just gussied our hawkers up and made them appear to be on the up-and-up when in fact they’re getting their products made under the same dubious circumstances to keep the costs low for price conscious consumers. This isn’t necessarily a condemnation though.

Of course people should strive to be as equitable to each other as possible because the most damning aspect of humanity is the landslide number one cause of human suffering is humans. So when we buy suspiciously affordable clothes rather than rethink how we allocate our budgets that’s at least problematic because our convenience is a result of someone else’s hardship. But don’t worry, that’s not the point of this post.

The point of this post is that humanity is essentially the same all over the planet. Our differences are superficial. Look hard enough and the things that appear to separate us are in fact the things that bind us. So until we can figure out how to be fair to each other when buying t-shirts I say:

Hawkers of the world, unite; your customers have nothing to lose but a greater percentage of their discretionary income that will in turn give you more discretionary income so that you can purchase more stuff at fairer prices!

{I know, not catchy enough. I’m working on it and then selling it on muscle shirts in a hawker stall.}