BOSTON. It’s noontime, which means the foot traffic into the E-Z Mart at the corner of Summer and Chauncey Streets in Boston has increased as office workers pop in for a “hot pocket” sandwich, a lottery ticket, or a newspaper. “I can’t take a full lunch hour,” says Phil DiSimone, who trades interest rate swaps as long as markets are open. “If I sat down for a full meal, some young kid might come along and figure out what an interest rate swap is, and I’d be out of a job.”
But sometimes navigating past the many homeless men and women camped outside the store would slow the progress of the twenty-something trader and others like him. “It was a real problem,” says Manny Carmen, the owner, of the vagrants who congregated at the entrance to ask customers for handouts. “Then I read how other places were using highbrow culture to drive the bums away, so I signed up for it.”
“I find Beethoven’s late quartets to be superior to early disco.”
Carmen is referring to the many convenience stores nationwide that pump classical music through outdoor loudspeakers to drive away loiterers, panhandlers, skateboarders and other social pariahs, and clear a path for paying customers. “Nationwide, same-store-sales jump ten basis points for every symphonic work you play outside the entrance,” notes retail consultant Clarissa Vogt-Daniels of Consumer Preference Advisors. “So what happened in Boston is anomalous, to say the least.”
What happened is that, while the high-brow pest repellent worked at first, after a while the undesirables of Boston, which prides itself on being the “Athens of America” because of its many institutions of higher learning, developed a taste for the stuff that had previously repulsed them.
“I’m sorry, we’ve got Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven in heavy rotation. NO Poulenc!”
“I’m going down to the 7-11 on Washington Street,” a street person known only as “Mitch” shouts to a one-legged man who calls himself “The Pope of Suffolk County.”
“You gonna just leave me here?” the Pope replies.
“I’m sick of Vivaldi,” Mitch says. “The 7-11 is starting the Brandenburg Concertos this afternoon.”
“The Hot Pockets are hot, the pizza is not!”
The factors that have frustrated convenience store owners here are complicated, say sociologists. “A lot of these guys spend part of their days sleeping in libraries when the weather’s bad,” notes Gerald Winslow, a post-doctoral fellow at New England University. “It could be they’re picking up culture by osmosis. God knows they can’t really like the stuff.”
Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs: A true classic.
But try telling that to Mike “Mad Dog” Blukowski, who has been living on the streets since he lost his job running a mok at a mokking company in Worcester, Mass. twelve years ago. “I don’t want to be tied down,” he says as he takes a seat outside a Kwiki-Store for a program of harpsichord that will include works by Rameau, Scarlatti and Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs. “If you buy series tickets for the Boston Symphony, you’re committing to five performances, and if Wagner’s on the program, you can’t give ’em away.”