Run off snake oil merchants

There’s a way of business making its way on to our streets. Reminiscent of the oldtime purveyor of Ebenezer Entwistle’s Effervescent Elixir and Tonic (guaranteed to cure everything), these people have revived an old, irreverent, dishonest art form and tried to give it respectability.

Armed with documents in hard copy or in electronic form on a device, they move around town, sticking to the well populated areas; they try to give the impression they are friendly, approachable, trustworthy.

They have failed. They are still snake oil merchants.

When you are stopped in the street and someone tries to sell you something, you are immediately at a disadvantage. We are a polite people, mostly, so we would never tell them to go away, not immediately.

We like to give people the benefit of the doubt, so we lay ourselves open to their initial pitch.

Even if we don’t welcome their attention and we ask them to leave, or stop bothering us, or let us pass, chances are they will ignore our wishes and impose themselves on us.

Chances are they have been instructed to do so by their superiors.

Midweek knows this because we have been told by their victims that these predators ignore the obvious go-away signs — their job is to pester you into a sale.

We were also probably on our way to somewhere else to do something completely unrelated to learning about a possible tax refund or signing ourselves up to a lifetime of automatic payments to a charity.

We were not going to someone’s office to buy what these people in the street are offering.

But still they pounce.

We are distracted: still thinking about where we were going or who we were going to meet.

Or we could be meeting them already, relaxing with a coffee and conversation on one of the many tables on the footpath outside a cafe´ .

But still they pounce. They are young, hungry and spurred on by the promise of commission.

Trained in the art of spotting, identifying and exploiting a weakness, they pounce, spouting their spiel and invading our personal space.

The latest young team, dumped in our streets to bring home the money, are trying to lure unsuspecting people into signing them up to deliver a possible tax refund — “For a small fee”.

That fee turns out to be a very high percentage, but you find that out later, after you’ve signed the form they cajoled you to sign.

You didn’t really want to sign, but they know they have you at a disadvantage, and before you know it, your signature is on the line and you’re handing back a pen you didn’t know you borrowed.

The thing is, it’s all entirely legal.

That doesn’t mean it’s ethical, or right, or even good business, because it’s none of those things.

It’s short-term profit and long term bad feeling.

That’s why they don’t stay in town long.

They outstay their welcome and have to move on before repercussions take on a physical nature.

You signed the form, your soul belongs to the devil in T-shirt and skinny jeans.

Try and reverse your decision, change your mind, suggest you signed under duress — they dare you to try and find anything illegal about what they’ve done.

They challenge you to test them in court. They know they’ll win because they’ve been there before — none of this is new to them.

The only answer we have is to become a little bolder, a little less approachable, able to stop the conversation before it even starts. Often it’s not in our nature, but we have to change to deal with the underhanded “business” practice that’s crawled out of the gutter and on to the footpath. There are plenty of legitimate businesses operating decently and within the fairly flexible bounds of civilised commerce, but putting people on the streets to exploit the weak, the tired, the distracted and too polite is not a nice thing to do.

They are vultures and they prey on those they can easily overcome with their rehearsed patter and practised badgering.

If that sounds dramatic, imagine how people feel after signing a form they had no wish to sign, after doing a deal with a company they don’t know, represented by someone they’ve just met.

On their behalf, we need to make these fortune hunters unwelcome.

We don’t need them in our town and we don’t need the predatory business practices they seek to revive.

We have enough crooks of our own, thank you, so take your promises of wealth, your charities we haven’t actually heard of until now, and those nefarious business dealings we despise, and remove them to somewhere else far away.

We always welcome fair and decent commerce and we would like to see new residents set up shop here in the search for loyal, long-term customers.

We like businesses we can visit, deal with and hold accountable when things go wrong.

Those are the people we want in our town. The others can keep on moving.