Berry Pickin'

Whenever I drive across the province lately I notice a trend. There are always people parked on the side of the road selling some form of berries. The Bakeapple being very popular around this time of year. People sit in their car all day, homemade signs placed on the side of the road and their mason jar full of berries laid out on the hood of their car just hoping someone will come by and give them $10 for a bottle. A few things about this make me scratch my head and bother me. The first is how many people are doing this. When I drove to St. John's last Friday I saw at least 7 people between Clarenville and Whitbourne  selling berries. Why is there so much competition in this "business"? Don't these people have better things to do? That's the second thing that boggles my mind. How do these people sit in a car all day on a (normally) hot day and just wait for people to come by? Do they spend all this time listening to the radio? Do they drain their batteries doing so? These are questions I want answered.

Another thing that bothers me is these people are cheating some sort of government system for sure, whether it be the Employment Insurance system or the Social Assistance program. I assume most of these people are getting some sort of government subsidy, and if they are on EI I guarantee they are not reporting their cash only income to the government. If they're on "welfare" or workers compensation, I damn well guarantee they are cheating those systems too because there is an awkwardly large amount of effort needed to climb through the woods and bogs to pick a lot of berries. If they're capable of doing this, they're capable of doing some form of labour intensive work.

Before I end the rant, just wanted to tell you what started this. When I was passing by Norris Arm I saw a straggly man and woman just standing on the road with a white bucket full of berries. No sign, no mason jar, nothing, just an open bucket showing off the berries to passing by cars in hopes someone would stop and want to by them. Why would anyone stop? For all I know there could be cigarette butts mixed in with those berries or anything at all. Why would someone think this approach would work? It just boggled my mind.

I know this was all over the place but yeah I'm not down with the berry picking community.