Andrew Loh
There he sits – in the warm afternoon. All alone by himself, in the courtyard at Waterloo Street. He is surrounded by several plastic bags of belongings, a cardboard which he sits on and one more which he uses to shield himself from the slight drizzle. A bottle of green-tea accompanies him.
Bare-footed and shirtless, he stretches out his arm, his hand clutching three packets of tissues, pleading with passersby to buy.
No one does.
The two temples at Waterloo Street are busy. Flower cart ladies solicit worshippers. Devotees light incense sticks and offer them to the gods. A Caucasian fortune teller tries to interest temple-goers with his service. Everyone, it seems, has something to do.
A lady stops at where the old man is. She dips her fingers into her purse, pulls out a coin, hands it to the old man and accepts the three packets of tissue papers. She walks away.
The old man places the coin carefully beside him. He mutters something to himself as he picks up a cigarette lighter. A single strike and a flame emerges. He places the tip of the cigarette to the flame and waits for it to burn. He says something as he lifts the cigarette to his lips.
I walk over to the old man.
“Uncle, how are you?” I ask.
“Alright,” he says in Hokkien.
I notice his cloudy eyes, perhaps a sign of cataracts.
“How much are these?” I pick up three packets of the tissue paper.
“One dollar.”
Raindrops…..
“Uncle, it’s going to rain.”
“If it rains I have to go. Cannot sell anymore.”
He adjusts the cardboard he holds over his head.
“You’re here everyday, Uncle?”
“No lah. I come only when it doesn’t rain.”
“Yes, I’ve seen you here many times.”
He looks at me and smiles.
“Have many people bought from you today?”
“Not many.”
“Ya, it’s not easy to sell. Is it enough for you to get by?”
“I make about $10 each day.”
“May I ask how old you are, Uncle?”
“I am 70.”
“And you live around here?”
“Yes.”
The drizzle becomes heavier.
“Uncle, it’s raining more now.”
“Yes, soon I have to go. You also have to go.”
“Ya.”
“You should go. If you stay here, no one will buy from me.”
“Ok. I understand, Uncle. Please take care of yourself.”
He smiles.
“I’ll buy three from you, ok?”
Fortunately, the drizzle stops as the old man continues to sit in the courtyard, with the cardboard held over his head.
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Gentle under the warmth of the sun
He is on the streets seven to eight hours everyday, starting from 4pm. “Now prices [for cardboards] aren’t that good,” he explains. “And when it rains, I cannot collect them.” Thus he also collects drink cans to supplement his income. He ends his day at 11pm and takes a taxi home. “It costs about fifteen dollars for the trip to and from my house,” he says. We guess that he takes the taxi because he has to bring his trolley along. Our curious eyes spot a bunch of keys hanging from his belt. They’re for locking up his trolley at night, we later learned. He hopes to sell it, because it is rusty and rickety, for four or five dollars and get a new one. It will make pushing it easier, he says. That would be a great help under such scorching conditions during the day.
A key maker and his dying trade
Turning somewhat sombre, however, Uncle laments that key making is a dying trade in Singapore. The keys produced nowadays with sophisticated technology makes it difficult for traditional key makers to reproduce.
“Some keys are made so delicate and complicated, I can’t produce them with my old machine,” Uncle bellows, adding that “it would also be too expensive to pay for the materials and machines required” if he wanted to keep up with the times.
Uncle Fortune worked as a volunteer in a Thai temple in his younger days. It was there that he learnt the ways of the Buddha from the monks. And evidently, he holds the teachings close to his heart. “Everyone changes as time goes by, so does the world,” he says. “Just live simply.” He still visits the temple about two or three times a week.
In his 30 years as a fortune teller, he has seen people from all walks of life. His customers range from a police officer complaining about his superior at work, to a person dying of cancer.
Mr Loh lost most of his right leg to diabetes. For the past three years, he has been busking at Orchard Road, earning $600 to $800 a month. “There’s no fixed income”, he said. “On good days I get $150, but some days I can only get $30. Life is tough, but what else can I do?”
Before he started busking at Orchard Road, Mr Loh used to perform outside Causeway Point. “I used to play there because it was near my house. Then the SMRT people kept complaining to the police, so I had to move.” Now he commutes from Woodlands to Orchard by long train rides on the MRT.
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Insurance agents should also set up booths there.
They have insurance plans to insure against illnesses, swine flu, bad fortune, ill lucks, poor health, accidents, death and everything conceivable .
They have very a powderful plan, indirectly in competition with the koyok man nearby,
and that is the whole life plan. It insures against death, critical illnesses, disability, retrenchment, Ah Long san, and anything the insurance agents will tell you. The koyok man also says the same thing about his koyok. It can cure anything , even bad luck.So, what the koyok man and the insurance have in common? They both get richer. What about their claims?
What ever the trade you see there there is competition, direct or indirect. The poor beggars’ earning is also affected.Everybody is there for money or for good luck. If the people spent on what they came for there is little left for the beggars. No one is there with the beggars in mind. Who would give to the beggars? They people who believe in giving to the poor; hope for luck in return; for good karma;
someone with loose change; someone who happens to be there; before entering the temple for good deed hoping the gods will see.So there are different reasons people give to the beggars.
What about the beggars?
Have you heard of the beggars’ society? watch too much TV, eh?Some beggars are syndicated beggars from China, Thailand, Malaysia etc. There is begging industry, an export industry. Why? It is lucrative industry now.
Why many people now want to be an insurance agent? The same question is asked about the beggars. It is lucrative, no need high qualifications, easy to get license., get rich quick , work on numbers, good acting ( like insurance agents some beggars also got training from their academy).Work from any place and any time so long begging and soliciting is not banned.
Who suffers?
The suckers who give and the suckers who buy insurance.
The people who suffer most are., the real destitutes, the poor, the real invalids , the old folks abandoned by children, the real honest insurance agents who have the interest of their clients at heart.
I am sure you come across all these fake ones that we sometimes mistake the real ones for fake ones. That is life and even the poor is not spared from making a decent living.
You are spot on here, hit the nail on the head. Just like people who donate to charity shows. They are thinking `Hey, this is a good deal, I get to do the right thing plus I have a chance to win something in a lucky draw’. And the so-called celebrities who perform dangerous stunts in the name of charities, they are thinking `hey, I get to do the right thing (feel good) and build my screen persona’. Question is, will you do the same when no one is watching at all? We all ought to answer that in our hearts. Do you treat your Father, Mother, Brothers, Sisters as kindly as you treat this pitiful people? Don’t get me wrong here, please help others but please help people closest to you first. The saying `Charity begins at home’ has a very profound meaning. It is saying `if you can’t even treat the people who love you well, you kindness out there is an act of hypocrisy’. You are doing it with an ulterior motive.
Some of the beggars and tissue sellers are not that old and are able-bodied. Begging and selling tissues (disguised begging) could be an easy and lucrative way of gettting money or they may well be made use of by syndicates. But those old men and women who cannot even stand up straight and have trouble walking and yet have to struggle to eke out a living cleaning the toilets, collecting dishes, go through garbage bins for cans, cardboard, etc – they are the genuinely poor and destitute. Just ask yourself – would they be doing these if they have a choice? I have the utmost respect for their dignity and self-reliance and sorrow that they have to fend for themselves even in the last years of their lives. We as a society should do much more for them.
Hi MITS,
I believe that you have not done any sales job before because if you have, you would have known the difficutly of being in the insurance biz. It’s 10 times tougher than normal sales job and i believe that they should be compensated for the hardwork (rejections) they faced.
Have you ever tried being rejected at least 50 times a day and after that still have to put up a smile? If you think so lowly of insurance agent, i hope you wont suffer from any illness because i doubt you should buy insurance from them. You should pay off all your debt using ya hard earned money.
There are alot of bad apple in any industry. Are you saying that in your own line of work, all are the best? If not, then should i say all the people in ya field sucks big time? If based on your theory, then all of us should not believe in buddhism and christianity since there are cases where the pastor or the head had done wrong things.
We both understand we should not judge people based on that so just hope you can be more macro when it comes to judging. There are people out there who are really doing their job as a good consultants.
4) Ahpete on May 2nd, 2009 12.02 am ,
Sure , considering the number of insurance agents, the number of product pushers, the number of koyok peddlers and the number of roadshows like those in Waterloo Street, it is tough and also not tough depending. But it is 10 times more lucrative than selling other things. Being rejected 50 times is an indication that you need to go back to your company’s training academy TO LEARN THE FINER SKILLS OF 5Cs. They are 1) convince 2) confuse 3) con 4) cheat 5) close
Maybe , you are a new bird. The old birds are good at the 5Cs. They have years of experience so they know what can sell and what cannot.
Basically, the sales precess begins with trying to convince the cleints of the good features and benefits of the products. If they fail to convince then out with other tools, to lie, to cover up, to distort, to misrepresent, to tell half truths and so forth. These are the selling strategies and they work all the time.
Apart from mastering the products why is it necessary to use them? Why master these skills?
The answer is insurance agents only sell wholelife , endowment, anticipated endowment and regular ILPs.. These are the products that give them high commissions and let them achieve mdrt. Any idiotic agents who can master the 5Cs selling process can make a lot of money and achieve mdrt.
What about Financial planning? too slow, lah..Product pushing, so fast..
Who suffers? the suckers, the unwary and ignorant consumers; the aunties and the old folks who are swindled, under insured, who will end up at Waterloo Street begging one day when they retire because money not enough.
It is well known that these favourite products of insurance agents are no longer good products . They only burden the consumers, they have poor protection, poor return.
Currently, so many policyholders lapsed their insurance policies because they are a burden allthough they need protection at a time like this and yet there are more urgent needs to meet. Many bought without knowing why , without considering their overall financial circumstances, without providing for emergency like this.All money gone into buying useless products like wholelife, endwoment and anticipated endwoment like cash backs which neither provide enough protection nor a good saving plan. They are ONLY good for the insurance agents because they give high commission and let them qualify for mdrt. But for the consumers they are impoverished with high premiums , overly skewed depriving other needs, low protection and enough most of the times to pay their own funeral service and leave family in the lurch, and unable to retire.
So you see, Alphete, insurance agents are no better than the koyok salesman at Waterloo Street. They sell , push, peddle, lie ,con, cheat, misrepresent and mis-sell to make the consumers/suckers buy your high commission products.
They are no professionals. They are peddlers. They push and they don’t advise.
Hi Jaga
Well seriously i totally understand where you are coming from esp the comm area. From my understand, the comm are high from the products you mentioned. But have you ever wondered that there are people out there who belongs to the bottom 20% people where they need to get insurance but yet either dun understand financial planning or no time for that? So i believe there will be times where agents simply talked about the main benefits to them ensuring they are at least covered enough to make sure their dependents don’t suffer.
Let’s not talk about bottom 20%. Let’s talk about people who are in highly profession. Eg: lawyer or doctor. Do you think they have the time and interest to sit down 4 hours with you to listen to your financial planning with them? I think if you managed to catch them for a good 20 min on a normal day is good enough.
Another way to putting is that if you are a chicken, shouldnt you talk in chicken language or you should still use human language to commnunicate? We just have to accept that to some people, basic or lay man way of doing business is needed. Too sophisticated (Financial analysis) stuffs seem to be useless to some people.
I’m not trying to say that agents is good or wad. I am just commenting on why people always talk so bad about agent pushing for high comm products and never explain. Maybe it is the client who either have no time to listen or not interested to listen but yet wan to settle for any plans.
If we look at things from people personality, we can also understand the behaviour of humans. Eg: if you possess the qualities of an owl, you are deem to be someone who is analytical, systematic, love organised things and into details and if you have the peacock qualities, whereby it loves to show off, recognition and beautiful things. From these two animals (there are a total of 4 birds for this personality test), can you imagine who will sit down and listen for 4 hour before buying an insurance product? The answer is obvious. Personally i am someone who is a peacock.
Can we change it? Yes we can. But is the agent at fault if i am not interested to hear so many boring analaysis? Hence i guess we just can’t blame all agents when there are only a few people kena ‘conned’
But afterall i really appreciated your feedback and at least i learnt about the 5Cs =)