A Beggar’s Market
The Bangalore traffic is known for being cruel and to add to the pain are the long-timed signals. While I was stuck at a signal with 145 seconds more to green, a woman in crumpled clothes navigated her way, vehicle to vehicle begging for money.
She had a peculiar behavior, she’d ask for money from someone on a bike or scooter for not more than 5 seconds, and if there was no sign of kindness or sympathy from the folks on two-wheelers, she would simply move on.
But she wouldn’t do the same to people in cars, she’d try harder and persuade them with her stories of pain, clearly putting much more time and effort. What was more astonishing was that the women would stop longer at cars with families, and her strategy was a deal-breaker. She did make money from most cars.
The ideology of segmenting the market into hot, warm, and cold customers based on behaviour is what many learn through formal education, and here came a beggar with no MBA but no less sharp than a graduate, identifying hot customers and even having a script of stories that managed to convince daily passers to hand out a ten-rupee note. Education truly comes in all forms!
Nice one. Real education comes from the experience.