Wanna buy a watch?

Back when I was living in Alaska I had a cohort living in Seattle and to make a few bucks in the winter I would get some pretty good produce flown in every so often and peddle it out of the trunk of the cab I was driving at the time.

It wasn’t illegal and even the police bought a few things here and there.

A few months later when the weather broke and things were looking pretty good the world caved in on me and I was back in the cab. My friend in Seattle sent me a HUGE supply of inexpensive digital watches and told me to move them.

He got them pretty cheap and I could make a pretty good profit selling them for about five bucks a pop out of the cab.

On one of my days off I noticed there were supposed to be about three or four cruise ships in and I decided to see what I could do with an All-American cliché from more Hollywood movies than I can recall.

The watch salesman.

I got myself a fedora and long coat from the Goodwill store and a couple of packages of drapery hooks from the hardware store and installed the hooks inside the jacket and hooked the watches onto them.

About the time the cruise ship docked I parked myself downtown at a heavily traveled street corner and used the oldest hokey Hollywood line in the world.

As someone would pass by I would whip open the coat and ask, “Wanna buy a watch?”

The watches sold like hotcakes and when I ran out of them after a few hours my take was about $400 if my memory still serves me.

I was surprised until I thought about it a while. I wondered why a person wearing a Rolex or Seiko watch would cough up twenty scoots for a dollar store watch until it hit me.

They were not buying the watch; they were buying the story that went along with it. They only bought to watch as proof that they really did meet a character with a long coat with a bunch of hooks in it selling watches.

If you are over 70 right now and bought a watch from a guy wearing a long coat full of hooks on the inside with a bunch of watches hanging from the hooks, that was me.

I’m still alive and doing well and I’m glad I helped make your vacation a little more memorable.

my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/