"Pizza Schmizza and Flaming Bagels"

Published 15 August 2003

(word count: 750)

Isn't it amazing, in this land of individualism, how public people who proudly proclaim themselves as our protectors just can't wait to regulate or condemn us into tight little boxes?  Try something a little new or different and step back while the entrails of hell burst open.

Like Blazing Bagels.  Dennis Ballen couldn't afford location location location so he opened his bagel business on a side street in Redmond WA.  To lure customers off the main drag, he posted an employee on the corner with a sign reading, "Fresh Bagels - Now Open."  It worked.  For six months.  Until the city issued a knock-it-off order.  Seems there's a legal reg that prohibits portable signs that publicize legitimate businesses but not ones that advertise real estate (big lobby, lots of campaign contributions), politics (watch out for number one) or a celebration (approved and permitted by the city, no doubt).

Fortunately for Ballen, the local Institute for Justice franchise is all over this one.  The libertarian lawyering league has filed suit on behalf of the beleaguered bagel baker's free speech rights.  Their further goal is to challenge the judicially contrived distinction that regulates commercial speech more severely than other types of speech.  The First Amendment, after all, makes no such distinction.  Free speech is free speech.

Meanwhile, the sign-holder was out of a job (thanks to those proudly proclaiming protectors) and the ordinance still prohibits signs containing commercial messages that can be held or worn by individuals.  Waitaminnit.  Worn?  You mean Washingtonians have to hang up their sweats and tees that say Nike or Seahawks or Tommy Hilfiger?  Such garments are obviously portable ads, and people voluntarily become sauntering signboards.

This latter fact hasn't been lost on another Redmond resident – Microsoft.

Last February, the Gates gang announced plans to pass out winter coats and sweatshirts to New York City's homeless hordes.  An act of charity?  Not.  An act of mutual benefit.  The winter gear is plastered with the MSN butterfly logo.  Microsoft gets their sauntering signboards and the sidewalk citizens get freshly laundered warmwear and a bowl of soup once a week.  So who loses from this arrangement?  Thus spake a woman angrily while walking on the Upper West Side, as reported by newyorkish.com: "It's disgusting.  They're literally profiting on the backs of the poor."  As though the poor will not be profiting on the backs of Microsoft.  But perhaps this homeless man had a more eloquent rejoinder: "I don't care what the damn jackets look like.  If you haven't noticed, it's goddamn cold out here."

Which brings us back to the Northwest, and to Pizza Schmizza.  The Portland pizzeria persuaded panhandlers to publicize their products.  Peter Schoeff, a twenty-year-old dumpster diver, holds a sign on the streets that proclaims, "Pizza Schmizza paid me to hold this sign instead of asking for money."  The payoff is a slice and a soda and a couple of bucks.  Said Schoeff to an AP reporter, "I think it's a fair trade."

But another one of those proudly proclaiming protectors, an "advertising watchdog group," doesn't care if both parties to a fair trade think it's a fair trade.  Gary Ruskin, director of the watchdogs, thinks people being used as billboards are – you guessed it – being exploited, and ought to be paid minimum wage.  Which would, of course, immediately put them out of work and back into the dumpster.

The watchdog group is Commercial Alert and was founded by that proudest of all protectors, Ralph Nader.  Ruskin growls that homeless-borne ads "blur the gritty reality of homelessness with a society dominated by corporate images and brand names."  Can anyone say, "So what?"  Why does homelessness have to be crammed into one tight little box and advertising stuffed into another?

The Blazing Bagels sign-holder wasn't homeless, of course, just unemployed, which is yet another box.  Bagel sign bad.  Vote for Bob Bagel sign good.  Freedom gets chopped up and crammed into separate compartments for no reason other than someone has the power to do it.  All for our own good, of course.  The homeless benefit from local, ad hoc capitalism.  But they benefit in the wrong way.  Only bureaucrats and traditional do-good organizations are supposed to help the homeless.  Allowing capitalism to work might give capitalism a good name.  Can't have that.  It upsets the traditional political cliché of capitalism bad, coercive liberal social meddling good.

So, as an act of defiance, I'm going to put on my MSN butterfly sweatshirt and eat a bagel pizza.  Join me?

- by Garry Reed

NOTE: After posting this article I discovered that the Microsoft anecdote is bogus. Please read "Product Lie Ability" for the story behind this story.