free variable

Kottke links to this NYT article about a “stooper” named Jesus Leonardo who makes a living cashing in winning off-track betting slips that others have mistakenly discarded. It’s a charming story, and the genesis of Leonardo’s stooping — which began when he grew frantic when the result of a race changed after he had thrown away a wager ticket — is ripped from comedy cliché:

“[The manager] said there was nothing she could do about [my discarded ticket],” Mr. Leonardo said. “I was so upset, almost in tears. Finally, she said, ‘Look, if you want to take the garbage home with you and look for your ticket, go right ahead.’”

He did. Although he did not locate his $900 jackpot, he found two other winners in the trash, worth a combined $2,000.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Mr. Leonardo, who had been supporting his family and his dream of writing songs by working odd jobs, including painting homes and cleaning windows. “I started thinking, there’s probably winning tickets thrown in the garbage every day.”

But as delightful as it is that he has found an unconventional means of supporting his family, there’s a problem with Leonardo’s story. By his own account, he works more than ten hours a day and makes about $45,000 a year. If we figure, conservatively, that a conventional employer would be paying him approximately 2/3 of his total compensation in salary, then that corresponds to a job with about a $30,000 annual salary. (Let’s not consider whether or not he would be able to obtain equivalent benefits that a larger employer would for the same amount of money.) Furthermore, Leonardo claims that he reports his income to the I.R.S.; since he is self-employed, he is responsible for the entirety of his FICA contributions (were he employed by someone else, they would be paying half of his Social Security and Medicare taxes).

It is remarkable that Leonardo had the cleverness to discover his job and to streamline the process to improve his yields, and I don’t want to diminish that his is a great story of entrepreneurship. But given the parameters above — the long hours, the total compensation equivalent to a conventional job with a roughly $30,000 pre-tax annual salary, and the increased tax liability of being self-employed — one wonders if he wouldn’t have been better off working in retail for a few years (a $10/hour salesperson job translates to about $21,000 pre-tax annually) and then working his way up to a supervisory or management role, where the salaries are greater and the total compensation is likely worth more than 1/2 of the pre-tax salary.

It is certainly possible to work one’s way up from an unskilled salesperson position to a management role — I saw several motivated people do it when I worked retail in high school and college. Like Mr. Leonardo, retail managers work long hours. Unlike Mr. Leonardo, though, they also get paid vacation and sick time. In addition, I suspect that a rather small percentage of a retail manager’s typical day is spent rooting through trash and scanning crumpled sheets of paper.