The Calvia police conducted an operation against "vendedores ambulantes" a couple of nights ago. These vendedores are, of course, better known as "looky-looky" or "lucky-lucky" men. According to a report in "Ultima Hora", the number of luckies heading for Magaluf of an evening has recently increased, as has the number of complaints. Cue plod.
The luckies are a part of the local scene, in whatever resort. Mostly they are harmless, but like anyone who does some street "selling" - and these can include legitimate PRs where they are permitted outside their own establishments and the scratch-card wretches - they can be a damn nuisance. Apart from the fact that they are selling shit (and sometimes they are selling a type of shit that comes in small wrapped packages), the biggest beef with them concerns the fact that they take away business from shops or others and pay not a cent of tax or social security. None are legal.
That the police in the different resorts often turn a blind eye to them has to do with the sheer numbers, lack of police resources and the fact that even if they get hauled in there isn't much that can be done with them. The police in Magaluf let all of its 41 catch of luckies go, save for one who'd got stroppy. As was once pointed out by an Alcúdia policeman, take one lucky in and another will replace him. There is a production line that never seems to run out of resources.
By coincidence, "The Diario" had a report on different types of vendedores in Playa de Palma on Sunday. To the luckies can be added the beach vendors selling if not necessarily shit, then highly overpriced fruit or drinks. As one shopowner pointed out, they go to a shop, buy some cans and then go and flog them at four or five times the proper price. Another example of the tourist being ripped-off. Doubly if the shop was already charging over the odds.
The simple solution would lie with tourists not encouraging any of the street sellers by not buying their wares or not being hauled off for a hard-sell pitch for holidays they don't want or need. The latter can be more difficult to shake off as there are more silver tongues, ones that speak the language well. The luckies can be fobbed off, and many do fob them off. But many do not. Kids are especially susceptible, and so therefore are their parents, because the kids often find the luckies funny and enjoy the game of bartering.
But should we really be so sanctimonious? Who has never bought some shit from a lucky or another seller? Who has never bought a dodgy CD or DVD? There are some, including bar-owners, who are good customers for the luckies and for those who don't bother with luckies and sell direct their packaged, pirated DVDs by the hold-all load.
The luckies and their nuisance and illegal value are an annual theme. Every year's the same. Despite the efforts of the police, and the Magaluf operation will probably prove to be isolated, and despite local laws that make it illegal to not only sell but also buy hooky gear (as is the case in Alcúdia), the luckies are not going away. Like the poor, they will always be with us. And there will be some who, strange to report, will be quite happy that they are.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Showing posts with label Pirated goods. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pirated goods. Show all posts
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Monday, March 02, 2009
Pipes Of Peace
As tweeted on Twitter, and I'm coming to realise that if it serves any purpose then the Twitter thing is as a breaking-news or advance-notice facility, Muro's mayor is still blowing a whistle in favour of the Sa Pobla train extension; he being all aboard for a trip to end at the Es Foguero ruin. There is only one reason why: it would almost be in Muro, and he wouldn't have to drive as far to catch the 9.30 to Palma. Despite admitting that it doesn't really have a lot directly to do with him (actually, it doesn't have anything to do with him), he has raised a motion for the train to run by the side of Albufera and finish up by the ruin and therefore close to the Muro hospital; so says "The Bulletin". Not even Alcúdia's mayor supports this idea any longer. At one point he was in favour, but the governmental technical bods have closed the line on this one. This route was one considered under the so-called southern option. No-one now, apart from the mayor of Muro, is even talking about this. So the question has to be: why has he brought it up? The train extension would not pass through Muro, which means it really is not a matter on which Muro's opinion counts; all the environmentalists are against this option and pretty much all the rest of Muro council is in fact against it, so why go on about it? As is pointed out, this same mayor is the one who is in favour of the golf course on the Son Bosc finca. Maybe he just likes to antagonise the enviro lobby. Nothing wrong with that, but he's wrong on both counts, and not for environmental reasons. There is no need for the golf course, and the northern route for the train alongside the main road from Sa Pobla has been staring everyone in the face as the obvious choice ever since President Antich announced his age of the train. No, I really don't understand what the mayor is hoping to achieve, other than to perhaps make people realise that he's still there.
How To Ruin An Otherwise Perfectly Pleasant Sunday Afternoon
March entering as a lamb, how agreeable to take to the terrace and to the late-winter sun, the Sunday papers to hand. Only for it all to be shattered. What is that frightful noise? Oh no, don't let it be. Anything but that. I'm afraid it was though. Two down, the neighbours two down. They'd bought a CD. Giving it a bit of an airing. Outside. Quite loud. You could, unfortunately, imagine yourself at one of the local markets. It was a CD of the Ecuadorean, some say Peruvian, pipe players. Crimes against musicality. That's not what the CD is called; they are the offences, m'lud. Sting's "Fields of Barley", U2's "With Or Without You", Buggles, "Video Killed The Radio Star". How deeply, deeply unpleasant, especially bloody Buggles in a South-American Indian stylie. I really should have done what I said I was going to do with that pipe to that pipe-player at Puerto Pollensa market those years ago. Now, I might have to do it to my neighbour.
Maybe there is a way of getting hold of all the CDs and letting a JCB loose on them. That's what they do with pirated CDs and DVDs and the like. Well, that's what the photo in "The Diario" suggests happens. But what of the chaps that sell them? The street vendors, the looky-looky aka lucky-lucky men. I can tell you. They get let off. The paper reports the case of a gentleman of "sub-Saharan origin", in other words a luckster, who was nabbed in Arenal with 100 CDs and some DVDs and video games. The prosecution had wanted him to be banged up for a year and to be fined. The magistrate disagreed. It was a civil matter and not a criminal one, she said, and the scale - i.e. the number of discs etc involved - did not merit the sanction being called for in respect of the violation of copyright. The magistrate accepted that rights had to be protected, but the real villains were those who produced the pirated stuff on a grand scale. In this, she is absolutely right. Annoying though the lucksters can be (and not everyone finds them so), they are at the bottom of the pirating food chain and just trying to earn a centimo or two. You may recall that there is now a by-law in Alcúdia which makes it an offence to buy from illegal street sellers. So now the possibility would exist to fine a purchaser and not the seller. Meantime, can someone fine the people who make these bloody pipe-player CDs?
QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Village People (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9OO0S5w2k). Hard hat was one of the group (the construction worker), and I suppose Red Indians and indeed cowboys were hunters. Today's title - no, not really.
(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)
How To Ruin An Otherwise Perfectly Pleasant Sunday Afternoon
March entering as a lamb, how agreeable to take to the terrace and to the late-winter sun, the Sunday papers to hand. Only for it all to be shattered. What is that frightful noise? Oh no, don't let it be. Anything but that. I'm afraid it was though. Two down, the neighbours two down. They'd bought a CD. Giving it a bit of an airing. Outside. Quite loud. You could, unfortunately, imagine yourself at one of the local markets. It was a CD of the Ecuadorean, some say Peruvian, pipe players. Crimes against musicality. That's not what the CD is called; they are the offences, m'lud. Sting's "Fields of Barley", U2's "With Or Without You", Buggles, "Video Killed The Radio Star". How deeply, deeply unpleasant, especially bloody Buggles in a South-American Indian stylie. I really should have done what I said I was going to do with that pipe to that pipe-player at Puerto Pollensa market those years ago. Now, I might have to do it to my neighbour.
Maybe there is a way of getting hold of all the CDs and letting a JCB loose on them. That's what they do with pirated CDs and DVDs and the like. Well, that's what the photo in "The Diario" suggests happens. But what of the chaps that sell them? The street vendors, the looky-looky aka lucky-lucky men. I can tell you. They get let off. The paper reports the case of a gentleman of "sub-Saharan origin", in other words a luckster, who was nabbed in Arenal with 100 CDs and some DVDs and video games. The prosecution had wanted him to be banged up for a year and to be fined. The magistrate disagreed. It was a civil matter and not a criminal one, she said, and the scale - i.e. the number of discs etc involved - did not merit the sanction being called for in respect of the violation of copyright. The magistrate accepted that rights had to be protected, but the real villains were those who produced the pirated stuff on a grand scale. In this, she is absolutely right. Annoying though the lucksters can be (and not everyone finds them so), they are at the bottom of the pirating food chain and just trying to earn a centimo or two. You may recall that there is now a by-law in Alcúdia which makes it an offence to buy from illegal street sellers. So now the possibility would exist to fine a purchaser and not the seller. Meantime, can someone fine the people who make these bloody pipe-player CDs?
QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Village People (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9OO0S5w2k). Hard hat was one of the group (the construction worker), and I suppose Red Indians and indeed cowboys were hunters. Today's title - no, not really.
(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)
Monday, April 21, 2008
My Boy Lollipop
So where was I? Ah yes. Record shops. A subject that cropped up the other day. A surfeit there may be of fashion shops and shoe shops, but the record shop is pretty thin on the ground. Unless someone can tell me otherwise, I know of only one shop that sells records (or to be more accurate CDs and DVDs) in Alcúdia and Pollensa, and that is the German Müller store next to Alcúdia's Auditorium.
A few years back, there used to be at least one record shop in both Puerto Pollensa and Puerto Alcúdia. The former never seemed to be open and finally gave up the ghost, the latter struggled on until maybe five years ago. This was called Lollipop, and it was in the same street as The Highlander Bar; it is now, I think, a locutorio. Lollipop was run by a German woman. I used to give her challenging assignments as to CDs I wanted to buy (this was before downloading came into real vogue). One of them was by Catherine Denby, an artist no one else in the world seems to have heard of other than myself and a presenter on the national radio station, RNE3. The CD in question never did turn up, and when I went one day to enquire I found that it was unlikely to ever turn up as the shop had gone.
Since then, with the exception of Müller (and stalls at markets), the area has been devoid of record stores. Whatever one thinks of downloading, there is little to compare with the satisfaction of thumbing through racks of CDs, though even this is nought as compared with the ancient ritual of the record shop (when vinyl was all there was and there were listening boothes). That there are no record shops is no real surprise. Lollipop struggled for several reasons - the emergence of downloading (even if it was in relative infancy), lack of stock (itself a factor of lack of business success), physical theft of CDs, and pirated copies. At the time, this latter factor was probably the most significant, and it is of course still a factor.
The guys who sell the pirated goods around the bars and on the streets (so-called "lucky-lucky" or "looky-looky" men) have a limited range of products - sunglasses, watches, jewellery and CDs and DVDs. It should appal, but somehow it doesn't as the whole "business" of pirated goods is so widespread.
I was once in Singapore, and a taxi-driver asked if I wanted some good products at good prices. He took me to a shop that had its windows taped over. Inside were Gucci this, Lacoste that. The Singaporean authorities took a dim view, especially as theirs was a country aspiring to total legitimacy in the global economy. The next day, I picked up the local English paper. It was called "The Straits Times" I think. On the front cover was a story about a raid against a shop selling pirated goods. It was the one I had been taken to only a few hours before.
I say all this because, although the Spanish police do have periodic actions against pirated goods, the selling of them goes on unabated. Spain and Mallorca are not the only places in Europe where this happens, but unlike Singapore which made a concerted effort to stop the practice, here it just carries on.
The sale of pirated CDs is one of the main reasons for there being an almost total absence of record stores. The added ease of the Internet has been the real killer though for such stores. While they have ceased to be, there are still plenty of places where you can buy sunglasses, watches and jewellery, despite the fakes that are available.
QUIZ: Yesterday - Dionne Warwick, penned by Bacharach and David. Today's title - who sang this?
(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)
A few years back, there used to be at least one record shop in both Puerto Pollensa and Puerto Alcúdia. The former never seemed to be open and finally gave up the ghost, the latter struggled on until maybe five years ago. This was called Lollipop, and it was in the same street as The Highlander Bar; it is now, I think, a locutorio. Lollipop was run by a German woman. I used to give her challenging assignments as to CDs I wanted to buy (this was before downloading came into real vogue). One of them was by Catherine Denby, an artist no one else in the world seems to have heard of other than myself and a presenter on the national radio station, RNE3. The CD in question never did turn up, and when I went one day to enquire I found that it was unlikely to ever turn up as the shop had gone.
Since then, with the exception of Müller (and stalls at markets), the area has been devoid of record stores. Whatever one thinks of downloading, there is little to compare with the satisfaction of thumbing through racks of CDs, though even this is nought as compared with the ancient ritual of the record shop (when vinyl was all there was and there were listening boothes). That there are no record shops is no real surprise. Lollipop struggled for several reasons - the emergence of downloading (even if it was in relative infancy), lack of stock (itself a factor of lack of business success), physical theft of CDs, and pirated copies. At the time, this latter factor was probably the most significant, and it is of course still a factor.
The guys who sell the pirated goods around the bars and on the streets (so-called "lucky-lucky" or "looky-looky" men) have a limited range of products - sunglasses, watches, jewellery and CDs and DVDs. It should appal, but somehow it doesn't as the whole "business" of pirated goods is so widespread.
I was once in Singapore, and a taxi-driver asked if I wanted some good products at good prices. He took me to a shop that had its windows taped over. Inside were Gucci this, Lacoste that. The Singaporean authorities took a dim view, especially as theirs was a country aspiring to total legitimacy in the global economy. The next day, I picked up the local English paper. It was called "The Straits Times" I think. On the front cover was a story about a raid against a shop selling pirated goods. It was the one I had been taken to only a few hours before.
I say all this because, although the Spanish police do have periodic actions against pirated goods, the selling of them goes on unabated. Spain and Mallorca are not the only places in Europe where this happens, but unlike Singapore which made a concerted effort to stop the practice, here it just carries on.
The sale of pirated CDs is one of the main reasons for there being an almost total absence of record stores. The added ease of the Internet has been the real killer though for such stores. While they have ceased to be, there are still plenty of places where you can buy sunglasses, watches and jewellery, despite the fakes that are available.
QUIZ: Yesterday - Dionne Warwick, penned by Bacharach and David. Today's title - who sang this?
(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)
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