The giveaways include free designer chairs and discarded—and winning—OTB betting slips.
Courtesy of a pair of NY Times stories:
From the Sunday magazine, Rob Walker’s Consumed column reports on an interesting little experiment conducted by Blu Dot, a design firm that set 25 of its brand-new Real Good chairs (retail price: $129) out for the taking on the city’s sidewalks. The point? Some sort of guerilla marketing/research thing; some of the chairs had hidden GPS-tracking devices on them, so the company could see where they went and follow up with their new owners. (Here’s more on the Real Good Experiment in “curb-mining.”)
And, from the Sports section, the story of Jesus Leonardo, a scraggly-bearded fellow who hangs around OTBs and hunts through the piles of discarded tickets on the ground. There are more discarded winners than you’d ever imagine, according to Leonardo—who earns about $45,000 a year from his winnings, even though he’s never placed a bet.