So I says to Mable, “Mable,” I says, “He’s a bum. Pimp him.”
Admit it: you’ve seen homeless people on the streets and wondered what they’d look like with killer rims and a Blaupunkt. (They’d look like Go-Bots, the unloved vagrants in this Transformers world.)
Thanks to the father-son marketing team of Kevin and Sean Dolan, respectively, you may wonder no more.
The Dolans have installed a lift kit onto Timothy Edwards, a panhandler in Houston, Texas. After seeing him and fellow homeless people begging for donations with cardboard signs, they decided to “insult people’s sensitivity or appeal to their humor” [their words] with PimpThisBum.com. They pay Edwards $100 a day to use signs with the URL, and when people log in to the site, they can donate money, gifts and services.
“Visitors seeing the sign flocked to the site and in less than two months Dolan received $50,000 in donations and pledges through the site for the man, including a five-week alcohol treatment program donated by Sunray Treatment and Recovery based near Seattle, Washington.”
We, here at SeriouslyGuys, hope this idea takes off. We’d like to see a competition grow out of this, eventually resulting in magazine covers with low-rider legless war vets.