The robots are stealing our jobs!

As if sign waving /swinging /spinning wasn’t a stupid enough idea, over the last year or so I’ve started seeing sign waving mannequins.

This makes me sad for humanity.

The original reason for having people wave the signs was to get around local signage laws that prevented a business from posting more than a certain number of signs.  The loophole was that if a person was holding the sign, it didn’t count as “posted”. 

Kind of like when a club offers me comped food with my performance contract and tells me I can order anything off their menu of crappy frozen/deep fried food-like items.  Yes, technically it’s food, but it’s really a food loophole.

So,then they started to get all fancy with all the sign spinning and such, which while definitely an eye catcher, I can’t imagine has a huge effect on the bottom line for a lot of businesses that try it.  How many times have you sat at a stop light going, “Man, look at that dude spin that sign!  What’s it say?  I have no idea.”

Now the reasoning has been transferred from “legal loophole” to “eye catching”.  They seem to think that just because a person is holding a sign you’re going to read it.  And from far away, you can’t tell if it’s a real person or not.  So instead of paying someone who really needs the ten bucks an hour, they put a mannequin out there with the sign.  And the psychological stupidity circle is complete.

Here’s my question…. If someone were to put out a nude mannequin with a sign (admittedly eye catching from far away, no?) would the mannequin get popped for public indecency? 

And if mannequins are going to be able to stand in for previously paid employees, will my next “sandwich artist” be made of plastic also?

I have an idea… Why don’t these places get some panhandlers, who have the work experience after all, and have them hold the signs and hand out coupons to people at stop lights.  Then pay the guy a commission based on how many coupons show up in the store?

That’s not a joke.  Someone needs to do it.  Because I’m tired of accidentally looking at hot mannequins holding signs on the sign of the road, dammit.