Social Experiment

I went to the grocery store a couple of days ago and, as I stepped out of my car, I heard classical music playing rather than the standard quasi-rock that is usually playing at the strip-mall setting in which my grocery store is situated. The quality of sound indicated to me (what with my powerful and keen skills of observation) that the music was being played live, so I began to look around, wondering what was going on. As I approached the front of the store, I spotted a man sitting on the sidewalk, just to the side of the entrance, playing a cello with his open case off to the side. The case had several coins in it and I have to admit, I was surprised there were no bills. This guy could really play. It was puzzling, though. What was he doing begging at the grocery store?

I suppose I operate under the assumption that people who beg come from destitute families. I readily acknowledge that many homeless are mentally ill (thanks to the deinstitutionalization that took place in the 70s and 80s) and a few may have some degree of education. I never really considered the depth of my assumption until this moment. Regardless of individual traits and charactersitics of the homeless (individually and collectively), I have always figured that they have no family to whom they can turn. At any rate, the guy playing his cello at the grocery store had obviously been formally educated (unless he was one of a very small number of people who is naturally inclined, which is not terribly likely), which indicates that he had access to financial resources at one time. This is why I found an apparently homeless man playing a cello outside of the grocery store strange. I began wondering why he was there. Many ideas came to me - perhaps his love of playing the cello superceded his interest in earning money and since he was unable to secure a paying position playing, he would just do what he loved and hopefully get by. Maybe he had a substance abuse problem (also very common in the homeless population) and was not able to keep a job (playing cello or nay) at all, but discovered that he could make enough money playing outside the grocery store to earn a meager (or maybe even substantial) living. And then, I thought that it was funny that none of the usual panhandlers were in front of the store that night. Apparently, the cellist had embarassed them. After all, he was earning any money he got, while they were simply begging. Then, it all became clear - the cellist is part of some social experiment! Maybe the cellist was conducting the experiment himself, but I suspect it was the state. The research question would be:: "Does having live performers (homeless or otherwise) decrease the incidence of panhandling?" In this case, the answer was a resounding yes.