Selling Your Stuff

I’ve only been in Toronto a few days, trying to explore as much of the city as I can. While there are certainly a lot of awesome sights (which I will be sure to blog about in the future), I’d like to use this post to remark how popular you see people selling on the street. In addition to the ways to all the street vendors, walking around in Toronto one will come across somebody who has their junk (or treasure?) scattered out all over the sidewalk in the hopes that somebody will buy it. This occurs even in urban as well as residential settings. My favorite example of the former is a man who sells books about a block or so west from the Metro grocery store. As you can see here, there are books of every type spread out over a large space. After buying a few cheap paperbacks, I went to ask the guy a few questions and to learn more about his business. It turns out that Mick has been selling books for just about 25 years and has seen every aspect of the industry. Most curious, I found, was that he at one point did own a number of bookshops in the past but they went under or had to be sold at one point or another. Undoubtedly his biggest hit came during the 2008 financial crisis. Mick has switched to selling books on the street since then, and is quite successful.  I was most impressed to learn that he keeps his books in covered shopping carts around the corner each night. Seriously, the fact that nobody tries to take them is testament to both the respect community has for him and Toronto’s high level of social trust—a feature that a lot of US metropolises seem to lack. Mick also has an assistant, who I believe is named Ralph, who’s just as fascinating.  I was sad to hear Ralph is currently homeless, but he insists he’s doing rather well for himself. When the day is slow, he likes telling stories about his life, which has been quite adventurous. In our brief conversation, he told me about how he was actually born in Eastern Europe after WWII but was taken to Italy to escape the Iron Curtain—quite a chat!

In residential settings, it also isn’t too uncommon to see people selling things in the middle of the street. Here for example, a couple sells a lot of CDs, DVDs, and other forms of media.

What I really like about this culture of Toronto is that it represents people having the right to sell things as they please without bureaucracy getting too much involved in things that don’t need to be monitored. In contrast, in the US it’s not too uncommon to hear about people who have to put up with burdensome regulations (there was a case a few years ago about a cop shutting down little girl’s lemonade stand, for example). It’s this kind of business environment that not only lets people like Mick and Ralph make an honest living, but also lets up and coming artist and entrepreneurs make the best use of their talents.