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“Litter,” said the bearded, sixtyish man in my office. “That sums up my problem in one word. I’m General Flanders and I have a fast-food business in the Blandsville Mall.” I had seen him, of course, and I had drunk his not bad coffee and eaten his not bad hamburgers and his fried chicken.
“People leave empty coffee cups and food wrappers all over the food court and the manager is getting mad at me and the other vendors. We tried putting up signs, but they did no good.”
“Maybe the litterers can’t read,” I suggested facetiously. I am cynical about modern education, having been a part of it for too many years.
“Not all of them,” said the General. “Most of the signs were defaced.”
“With spelling and grammatical errors, I’ll bet,” I said. “It’s too bad you can’t fail people for errors in graffiti.”
I agreed to try to help General Flanders and the others and he gave me coupons for a free burger and coffee, and later that day I went to the mall to check the scene of the crimes. As I sipped my coffee – not Louis Cyr but not bad – I saw what a mess the food court was: a few people put their trash into one of the three receptacles provided, but many left it on a table or threw it inaccurately at a garbage can and it ended up on the floor.
A sloppily dressed youth in his late teens approached me. “Kin I borrow a cupple uh bucks?”
“When will you pay it back?” I asked innocently.
The junior panhandler looked puzzled. Did he want the money for food, cigarettes, or drugs? Hoping he was in genuine need, I compromised and gave him a dollar and he left to seek another benefactor –or sucker.
After half an hour of observation, I had an idea. I consulted with General Flanders. “It will require a little money, but it may help. Replace the current receptacles with ones that praise the thrower each time the shooter sinks his or her garbage into the garbage container, like a basketball player. People respond to praise and this would encourage them to put their trash in the right place. You could even offer prizes but that might become too expensive.”
The General liked the idea and sent me to Handy-Mann, a nearby business that specialized in custom-making unusual objects. In a couple of days Mr. Mann had created three containers. I recorded the complimentary message in my best oratorical voice. Mann estimated that each set of batteries would last about a month.
We took the new garbage containers to the mall and replaced the old one. Then I sat down to observe the results. As I watched, my teen-age loanee approached and asked for another “loan.” I “lent” him another dollar. I hoped that this case would be over before he had “borrowed” my entire fee.
“Good shot,” my recorded voice said as a wadded serviette dropped into one of the new receptacles. All of the food vendors were happy to see more litter in the receptacles and less on the floor, as was the mall manager.
General Flanders thanked me and said that all of the food vendors were grateful and paid me.
A couple of weeks later, I visited the mall again and had another Flanders coffee. But there is one small, new problem: there is much less litter to pick up from the floor, but the janitors complain that they have to empty the trash receptacles more frequently.
And as I sipped my coffee, a sloppily dressed teen age boy approached me.
