Banned: Freesheets Street Hawkers

Street Rustlers

You hear them first, as you step off the train, rise up the escalator or make your way along the pavement. From a distance it sounds like the keening wail of a third-world mother who has just lost a child. Over and over again, the mantra builds in volume, until you see its source: it’s not woman in distress at all. It’s a person handing out a freesheet, and trying their level best to shout the name of that freesheet at every passing commuter. Freesheets, for those of you blessed to not live in a metropolis polluted with their filthy ink, are newspapers and magazines handed out ‘free’ to commuters, and they should be banned instantly.

It began innocently enough with a London free paper called Metro. This was alright, as we, the punters, chose to pick up a Metro or not. They were kept in little blue boxes at every station, and if you forgot to pick one up, you didn’t need to worry as there would be several thousand abandoned all over the carriages of trains and tubes by 7am, so you could just pick one up off the floor if you felt so inclined. You picked up a Metro, skimmed through it, and chucked it on the floor. No problem. Take it or leave it.

Then came the hawkers.

On the back of the success of Metro, in London at least, a whole rainforest of free newspapers and magazines appeared - London Lite, The London Paper, Sport, ShortList, WeakGame, Cut&Paste, HeadLice -  but things had moved on in terms of ‘distribution’. A box which let the punter choose was seen as too passive: these new papers and magazines decided to have t-shirt and baseball-cap clad cronies blocking the paths of righteous folk as they thrust their sub-standard pap into our faces. When I say ‘sub-standard pap’ what I mean is the stuff thrown onto the pages of the freesheets is crap: cut-and-paste stuff from real newspapers and websites, diluted into baby-milk because we are all so thick it is all we can drink. The idea behind the street hawkers is clear: if they stand in your way, wail an unintelligible chant and thrust a paper in your face there is a good chance you might take that paper just to get past these insane people. There is also a chance that, like me, you’ll bin that paper in the first bin you come to (or drop it on the escalator if the heaps of freesheets which flop pathetically at the bottom every day are anything to go by). The passing of the paper from hawker to you to bin is what the owners of these freesheets call ‘circulation’.

Anyway, every day now we run the gauntlet of these idiots, and I want it banned instantly. If I want to get something to read I am capable of choosing it, and buying it. I am not a freetard. The street hawkers are like aggressive beggars who hassle you to take their rubbish away. It’s absurd and it’s depressing. It’s killing real newspapers which are already suffering, it’s force-feeding mush to people who should know better and, more importantly, it muscling out the Big Issue sellers, who at least have the grace to charge a fee for their magazine which actually has something in it.