Standard procedure for entrepreneurs
New Evening Standard owner Alexander Lebedev has become an unwitting sponsor of London’s tramps and ne’er-do-wells.
Thanks to a confused pricing policy, which pitches the newspaper at 50p when it first hits the street, 10p if you are getting a late-night train from one of London’s mainline rail stations and nothing at all if you happen to be in the West End after 10pm, quite a number of the capital’s hobos are cashing in.
They merely pick up as many free copies of the paper as they can late in the evening and hawk them at 25p — “half-price” they say — to passers-by who may not yet have heard about the Standard’s pricing eccentricities.
Maybe this is all part of editor Geordie Greig’s plan to “reconnect with the greatest city in the world”.
Somehow I doubt it.