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The art of hawking:
Consistency vs contingency

The lady calls out, ‘Hipon! Sariwa!’ Prawns! Fresh! Fresh from the icebox. In fact, her little bilao, a round, woven bamboo tray, lies on top of the icebox. (The lady in the photograph is Frances Bean’s own shrimp vendor, in Manila, image I downloaded from flickr.com/), and she has not only one but two Styrofoam iceboxes since she has more shrimps to sell. Except for the bilao of my lady, if you’ve seen a street vendor, you’ve seen them all. My lady is selling her wares at the sidewalk in Alabang, Muntinlupa, Rizal, an hour ride from Manila, from where I have just come from. Both ladies are doing exactly the same thing everyday they don’t give much thought of it anymore: Each abrogates a part of the public space for sidewalkers like me. Each is a hawker.

According to the SAC, street selling, sidewalk vending, ambulant peddling or hawking is a ‘coping strategy’ of poor people in order to survive (undated, sacoast.uwc.ac.za/). The banks in South Africa call it a ‘survivalist enterprise’ – no paid employees and little asset value (Francis Antonie, 2001 June, nu.ac.za/). Which tells me hawking is exactly like ‘subsistence farming’ – you get from the soil enough to be able to cultivate it the next time around. The way I see it, subsistence farming survives because farmers don’t know any better. Which means, nobody has taught them any better.

Is that the case with hawkers? From the point of view of the Government of Andra Pradesh in India, there are two reasons for the ‘long life’ of hawking (GAP, 2004, ourmch.com/). One, because the urban families encourage it, being an inexpensive source of items. Two, because the rural families encourage it, being highly labor-intensive, hence many people can engage in it. Sidewalks and street corners everywhere, jobs everywhere. Now then, where hawkers abound, many hands make light dreams and many bodies make heavy air. You can see a little money being made; you can smell urine and, sometimes something else.

‘It’s very, very difficult to make a living by selling on the streets,’ says Diego Cardoso of Los Angeles, California. ‘You do that when you don’t have any other options’ (Gilbert Estrada, 9 May 2005, newamericamedia.org/news/). Cardoso is part of the Custom Mobile Commerce project of California. From him, we learn that hawking has always been there throughout history.

Hawking happens mostly where it is illegal. From Cardoso, I gather that there are two implications of that. One is that the food hawkers can’t handle well the food they sell, endangering public health. Two is that the quality of the product itself suffers. For instance, there is not enough water for washing well – the used glasses are dunked into the same pail and they are pronounced clean. The oil is rancid, the meat tastes like yesterday’s leftover.

Has India perfected the art of hawking? The National Association of Street Vendors of India reports that the Indian Supreme Court has ‘declared street vending as a fundamental right’ (NASVI, 17 August 2006, nasvinet.org/). That takes the cake! That is perfectly logical and certainly anti-social; it is the ‘fundamental right’ of the minority to sell to survive versus the ‘fundamental right’ of the majority to be left undisturbed while walking on the sidewalk, crossing the street, or waiting for a ride – not to mention the right to clean avenues and non-smelly alleys and corners.

I remember my would-be mother-in-law hawking vegetables and such along Dart Street in Paco, Manila in the late 1960s. For her 12 children, with her bilao, she hawked her wares and more than survived – all the 12 went to school. Today not all have a college degree, but that was not her plan at all. At any rate, in her own way, she perfected the art of hawking.

I have never been outside the Philippines, so I thought the Filipinos had perfected the art of hawking. But just looking at the hundreds of images Flickr found me when I searched for sidewalk vendor (not italics, of course), convinces me that everywhere in the world, they have perfected the art of hawking: China, Iran, Italy, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Thailand, Ukraine, Vietnam, New York City.

Looking at many of those Flickr pictures, I say the rule of thumb of hawkers must be one and the same: Contingency, never consistency. They must be all pragmatists, doing what works, selling what sells.

In that case, pragmatism is like a self-aborting entrepreneurship. Hawking, you’ll never become bigger, or better. For an entrepreneurship to work itself into sustainable success, if I understand Michael Gerber right, based on his bestselling book E-Myth Revisited (New York, HarperBusiness, 1995, 268 pages), you need system, system, system, system, system, system – primary aim, strategic objective, organizational strategy, management strategy, people strategy, marketing strategy. And the 7^th is what you need to tie every other system together: systems strategy. The best hawker? Perhaps she has 1 or 2 or even 3 of Gerber’s systems, that’s all. Once a hawker, always a hawker.

17 August 2006