The Kmart Jewelry Hustlers

I was shopping at Kmart when a middle-aged woman approached me and offered me a ticket.

"Jewelry raffle in five minutes upstairs!" she said. "Don't miss it!"

She was not wearing a Kmart uniform, which immediately aroused my suspicion. And since when does Kmart hold jewelry raffles? So I picked up some refill scrubbers for my dishwand, and walked upstairs.

The woman and her partner were dressed in sequined sweaters and black pants and leather pumps. In the middle of an aisle bisecting women's intimates, the women had erected a podium lit by a number of incandescent bulbs. Cheap necklaces sat on black velvet stands beneath the lights. A curious crowd, made up of a random cross-section of Los Angeles (out-of-towners, would-be models, mothers pushing strollers), had gathered for the prospect of free jewelry. The ladies welcomed everyone with thick Brooklyn accents.

It quickly became clear that somehow, these two ladies had conned Kmart into allowing them to hawk their wares on store premises, which had to be a brazen breach of corporate policy. This was the sort of thing that could only happen at the 3rd Street Kmart, which has long been legendary for its circus-like and lawless atmosphere.

Screenwriters essentially attempt to control and predict the emotional response of a viewer on a scale of minutes. These ladies were doing the same, but on a scale of milliseconds.

With deftness and poise, they moved from the initial lure of the raffle, to an interactive segment of voting on favorite jewelry, to a value proposition in which increasing amounts of jewelry were stuffed in a sandwich bag, to an announcement of false scarcity -- all within the span of TEN MINUTES. Neither broke a sweat.

The crowd never lost interest, never left. The crowd never had a chance.

Much jewelry was sold.

And the ladies promptly decamped - presumably in search of the next Kmart.