Free Money

So this exercise was pretty weird. For my class, we had to take 5, 1 dollar bills and hand them out to people in public. For this to occur, we had to develop a strategy. My strategy for this exercise is listed below:

• Where will you go?
• Checkers!
• What kind of people will you approach?
• I will approach anyone who is walking up to the Checkers. I designed a sign that says "do you like money?" so as to gain their interest. The people I assume who will take my money are hungry, curious people walking by or to the Checkers. There is also a large homeless population that hangs around Checkers so I think I'll be able to give out money fairly quickly.
• What will you say to get the conversation started?
• I will say "hi! Are you getting something to eat?"
• What is your plan for the conversation?
• After my initial question, I plan on saying "here's a dollar so you can get something extra with your food!" If they don't want the money, I'll just say "okay" and "enjoy your Checkers." If they ask me why I'm trying to give them a dollar, I'll say something like "I want you to be able to get that extra milkshake or fries that you may have written off b/c you didn't want to spend the money."
• Out of five attempts, how many dollar bills do you think you will be able to give away?
• I believe all of them. 

Here's the resulting video:

Reflection:
At first, this was a lot harder than I realized. People kept giving the dollar back to me because they said they didn't need it. I also had to change locations because there wasn't a lot of people where I was. I ended up in front of the gas station and that's where I had the most success. Checkers was a bust.

Later, though, it was easier. I changed my tactic of telling people that I was giving them a dollar to buy food to telling them to keep the dollar so they can pass it on or do whatever they want with it. They were offended when I originally told them to go buy food with it. One guy even asked if he looked homeless and I had to do some quick back-peddling.

So my predictions for the assignment were definitely off. I had to change my location, my strategy, and it was a lot harder than I realized. At first, I assumed that anyone would take a dollar since it was just a dollar and this was suppose to be harmless. I thought people would love getting a dollar to get some food. Instead, they were offended.

In conclusion, this was a strange exercise that I enjoyed but also had some trouble with. It was fun giving money to people who enjoyed getting it. It was super weird when people were offended... selling things is hard!!!!