“Change” your approach to Halloween?By Chris DeMento
According to its Halloween press release, Coinstar claims the average household has nearly $90 in loose change just hanging out under the couch cushions. These are 90 entirely expendable dollars. Coinstar suggests you spend your loose coin (after having it counted for a small fee at one of their machines, of course) on your creepy-adult-whatever costume; then, after all the trick-or-treating, your kids can pay Coinstar to count up the dimes given them by crazy old ladies from the Sunset. It's all very convenient.
Yet even as Coinstar attempts to leverage consumer interest in Halloween buffoonery, nudging you toward its coin-counting haunts, questions remain: where do you find a Coinstar machine in this city? And dude, does anybody have $90 worth of change lying around? That's a load of malarkey.
Photo from www.engadget.com
C'mon. You're better than that.
Consider that our mayor has spent a whopping chunk of change, over 60K, on trying to prevent folks from showing up for Halloween on Castro. He has his reasons. The usual crush of intoxicated humanity puts a strain on a tight little neighborhood, a strain which the City admits it can't manage all that well. That's why I'm going to dress up like a Google employee (the old serial killer joke: no costume) and spend my couch-cushion finds on a fake-veggie (i.e. meat-and-hoof) corndog come Hallows Eve. Maybe I'll watch some holiday Deal No Deal if I can find it on the box. No shotgun blasts for me, Howie. Y'all enjoy the party from inside those iPod outfits you're fittin' to make.
I do sometimes wonder, though, if Newsom dresses up for Halloween on the down and low. I wonder how much positive change he really has up under his couch cushions, floating inside the breast pockets of those same blue suits? And why can't he just flatly admit that the City is short on dough? Were he able, I might just dress up as a Newsom voter.
Or here's a thought: hold off on both the corndog and the costume, open your web browser, access Coinstar's machine locator, make a list of all of Coinstar's outlets, and submit said list to Newsome's office. This way we can begin to forward an initiative that suits all of us -- the mayor, his citizenry, and Coinstar alike: gifting all our loose change to the City in the name of affordable housing.
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