I don't know how we missed this last week, but Salon produced a short clip about Same Old Line Dudes, our old friends and a small company based in New York City founded solely on the basis that people will pay other people money to wait in line for them. Founder Robert Samuel says his company has waited in line for Cronuts (the lamest food hype sensation the city has ever seen), sample sales, SNL standby tickets, concerts, brunches, and passports as he's currently in line waiting 48 hours for an iPhone 6 Plus on behalf of a client. As for pricing, it's $25 for the first hour and an additional $20 for each following half hour. How much did he make waiting for said iPhone? $965. Damn, not bad.
Samuel says that he'll make $1,000 a week during a good month. You gotta consider that there needs to be high demand surrounding good openings and product releases in those times to keep steady work, but that's not a bad way whatsoever to make a living. Though, presumably, his posture is all sorts of fucked up from sitting in lawn chairs for days on end. Anyone who's ever tried to cop a Japanese-exclusive is well aware of proxy services and we've all heard of getting adults to buy you booze or even trying to get a homeless man to wait for you in line by paying him with booze (this really is a booze-based economy), but this is the next, higher, smarter level. Next thing you know, Supreme lines aren't going to be any fun at all.
