I mentioned this before – the beach is only about 2 minutes away from my apartment. Now that I don’t have to go to work every day I am using the chance and going to the beach every day.

As you can expect, at this time of the year there are many foreigners here. The influx of tourists brings the small sellers of T-shirts, shitty watches, cheap sunglasses etc. Some of them walk the beach all day long.

One of these guys uses a street smarts technique – he is constantly repeating, almost chanting, only two words with a small pause between each word: “Madam… Price…” (repeat, ad nauseam).

Men don’t care about shopping* nearly as much as women do, so he's addressing “madam”. And the only other thing they might be interested in is “price” since the quality of the items ain’t for sure what’s attracting the customers. He is also using English because it’s more likely to be understood, even though his English is most likely barely usable (most of the sellers come from African French ex-colonies and speak French fluently, but not English).

Practical and effective. The business doesn’t scale much and doesn’t bring much I guess, but at least he is increasing the chances for a sale with a simple approach.

*A special sub-species of men are programmers who care about shopping even less – physical shopping, that is. They tirelessly comparison-shop online and when they are content that all the opinions in all the forums traversed are reasonable, programmers order online and have the item delivered to their home.