Pete The Market Trader

I wish to make a complaint.

Now, this is not like me being the jovial soul that I am but as you touched on it the other day Mr Hawkins I feel the plight of us market traders needs to be highlighted.

‘Wear your old band t-shirt to work day’.  Whose bright idea was it to have it in the middle of November?

It’s alright for all of you office wallah’s who work in nice heated environments where you can swan around all day in your short-sleeved fine cotton band merchandise but please spare a thought for the rest of us.

The poor souls who get up at five in the morning and travel to work in rusty transits with broken heaters and then spend the day outside in the freezing cold with our band t-shirts safely buried beneath a tuckerman coat and a fleece.  And I make this complaint not just on behalf of market traders but also for scaffolders, builders, farmers and cowboys.

We want to play too but we’re being barred from the club.

Come on Steve, move it to June so that we can all join in.

Up the workers.

That’s this weeks’ report from Pete the Market Trader.  The man on the street.  Literally.

There are certain questions that the punters ask that get an automatic response.

“Will this fit my brother?” always gets the answer, “Yes”.

The fact that I have never met the ladies brother and therefore have absolutely no idea of their size is irrelevant.

“Is the for a boy or a girl?” always gets the response, “They’re unisex my love”, the fact that the garment may be pink and has flowers on it again is neither here nor there, after all, who am I to dictate gender roles.

My favourite pat response is if one of my lady customers refers to me as young man, a ridiculous greeting as I am approaching fifty but when you consider I have punters in their eighties I suppose it’s relative.  This always gets met with me singing the second line from the Village People song:

“There’s no need to feel down.”

Most of the time they just look at me blankly.

This week a lady called me young man and after my reply she said “Young man”.

“When you’re in a new town” I responded. And she said “Young man”.

I thought ‘finally someone who’s with it, someone who gets the joke’.

Then I forgot the next line.

One day I hope to make it to the chorus.

That’s this week’s report from Pete the Market Trader, the man on the street, Literally.

I’ve been covering Optimistic Kens pitch on Western Sundays as he’s off on holiday again

Because of where his pitch situated I have the delights of getting to watch the demonstrators that pull up on the pitch next door.

This week it was the perfume mob, their pitch goes like this:

“We’re here today to promote the company (they’re not) and today we’re giving away the gear on a special promotional offer (they’re not).  If you like (at which point they name various different famous perfumes) then you’ll like this.

They then go on to sell box sets of men’s and ladies perfume for a score a piece.

I stand on the stall next door and have to resist the temptation to shout at the punters, ‘don’t do it you fool’s!’

They say in their pitch, “This is a one off special promotion, we are paid to stand the promote the company.  We won’t be here next week because we’re doing the Ideal Home exhibition and so this is a one off”.

At least the last part is true, they won’t be there next week, that way no one can bring back your bottles of coloured water and ask for your money back.

Buyer beware.

That’s this week’s report from Pete the Market Trader.  The man on the street.  Literally.

I served this guy on Finchley on Friday, five minutes later he was back on the stall.  He says,

“I think I might have left my phone on your stall”.

Now there are over a hundred different trays over gear on my stall, it would take you forever to go through the lot.  So I said to him,

“Do you know the number? I’ll ring it”.

As luck would have it he did know his number, not everyone does.  I rung his phone and shouted out to all of the punters to keep an ear open but alas, no ringtone was heard.

The guy left to search elsewhere.

Fifteen minutes later I got a call on my mobile.  It came up as a number I didn’t recognise so I thought it was either PPI or someone I owe money to but I answered it anyway.

On the other end of the line was an indignant sounding man who said,

“Did you just call my phone!”

I recognised the voice, it was the bloke who had just been on the stall.

“Yes mate”, I said, “You were on my stall, you lost your phone, you asked me to ring it”.

Realising who I was his mood instantly lightened.

“Oh yes, thank you”, he said, then he went on to say, “I found my phone by the way”.

You don’t say.

That’s this week’s report from Pete the Market Trader, the man on the street, Literally.

For weeks now I have been plagued by punters that all seem to want dressing gowns.

Finally concerned with all of these potential sales that I must be missing I went out of my way and brought some in.

I thought great I’m going to smash it.

Sure enough, the usual mob turned up with the same question:

“Got any dressing gowns?”

“Yes”, was my triumphant reply pointing to the massive pile of newly acquired gear.

Every response was the same:

“Oh” and then

“Have you got any cotton ones?” Or

“Do you have them with a tiger on?” Or

“Have you got any blue spotted ones, with an Arsenal badge on the front?”

The truth is they don’t just want any dressing gowns, they want the one that they once saw in Marks and Spenser.

And they want it for a quid.

There was one lady who asked for exactly what I had in stock and when I showed her what she had asked for her response was,

“Are you hear next week?”

I replied, “I’m here every week love, I’m here every week, have been for twenty-five years”.

That’s when she uttered the immortal line

“I’ll tell her”, referring to some mythical woman that she pretended to be shopping for and walked off.

Back to the basics for me then.

That’s this week’s report from Pete the Market trader.  The man on the street.  Literally.