The best solution is to take everyone waiting for an Apple product and give them a one-way bus ticket out of town.
In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread. - Anatole France 1894.
If someone’s camping outside for an Apple product (or a video game, or tickets to a show, or a movie debut, or a convention, or a dozen other things), there’s a set date and time they’re leaving. A homeless person is likely looking for an indefinite place to feel safe and get some sleep for the forseeable future.
Are the Apple campers harassing passersby? If so, then I agree that they should be asked to leave.
My goodness, there’s a hypocrisy in modern American society? How can this be?
I don’t understand why this is even a story. If the homeless were lining up to spend $600, the police would not bother them at all. The Apple crowds are a smelly, inconvenient fire hazard, but they have money to spend.
Is it merely class divisions or is there also some acceptability in Apple customers sleeping on sidewalks because it’s known to be temporary? This is probably addressed in the article, so I should RTFA.
And regardless of the reason Apple customers are acceptable and homeless people are not it bothers me the way the homeless are treated. Local bus benches have bars on them to prevent anyone lying down on them, but there’s also this note.
I’ve noticed, though, that the police don’t care if the homeless sit on bus benches. Neither do bus drivers.
Utah has developed the Housing First program. They figured out that providing housing to homeless people was:
- significantly cheaper for taxpayers; and
- the best way to take the most stressful problem off the table for homeless people so that they could start to concentrate on other aspects of their lives, such as finding a job, getting mental health care, etc.
We choose to treat Apple customers as more deserving of a break than homeless people. We don’t have to.
I would assume that the Apple folks are allowed to sleep on the sidewalks because of those religious freedom laws that seem to be all the rage now-a-days…
A big difference is once they buy their product, they leave…until the next product launch.
So if the homeless person promises to leave that spot at 8 AM the next morning, they should be fine to sleep on the sidewalk outside the Apple store?
First of all, anyone that camps out in front of an Apple store is more mentally ill than any homeless person.
A sane person - like myself - goes online to their carrier’s website, orders their iPhone and it shows up via FedEx the same day that it’s released in the store.
Getting that out of the way, America has a long history of kicking the most vulnerable people. Partucularly when they are at their most vulnerable.
As noted by someone above, SLC pretty much took care of their homeless by… housing them.
But you know, we can’t be giving people hand outs!
“Someone got something and I didn’t get it!!” said every 8 year old. And wanna be rich republican/libertarian.
Customers are under the thrall and control of Apple. Homeless people are categorically the opposite.
I think a lot of people enjoy the in-person experience, the camaraderie of other Apple fans hanging out together, the employees high-fiving you as you enter, the news crews covering the event, etc. It’s not just about greed. Folks can buy concert tickets online, too, but they still camp out to get them in person. Are Springsteen fans “mentally ill” because they hang out with other Springsteen fans to get tickets at the box office?
Kind of like migrant workers?
Or, maybe a pilgrimage?
Free housing for the homeless. Man, the poor get all the breaks.
Box office?
I haven’t bought a ticket at a box office in over 20 years.
And yea, I used to stand in line to get tickets in front of the Record Factory in San Jose when I was a kid and it was mildly fun.
But I also didn’t have a full time job and didn’t have a choice.
BTW, I never said anything about greed.
Yes. Yes they are.
There are a range of mental health, public safety, and public health issues that come with a human permanently residing on the streets. Those issues are largely absent from the Apple crowd. If an Apple Watch customer took a dump on the sidewalk in front of the Apple store, you better believe that line would be chased off in a hurry.
Here in Durham there is a pretty visible homeless population. I’m not sure if there is adequate shelter space available to them. When the temperatures dropped into the teens this winter, there was a big effort to get the homeless population indoors. This effort encountered some resistance, even when these poor people faced freezing to death by staying outdoors.
I think it’s important to provide safe, clean housing for these people (and I wish we could do this at the goverment level, instead of piecemeal at the church or charity level), but the challenge is more complicated than “Build it and they will come.” I’ll have to read about SLC’s efforts.
Another way of saying this is that the problem with homeless people camping is not that they’re camping, it’s that they’re homeless.
So camping on the street is OK when you’re doing it for fun, but for those doing it out of necessity, it should be illegal.
Welcome to bizarro-world, a.k.a. capitalism.
