Ask any Street Roots vendor and you’ll learn there’s more to selling the paper than you may think. Take Sean Sheffield and Rebecca Moran, for example. The dynamic selling duo dominates the corner of Southwest Fifth Avenue and Morrison Street, and if frequenters of the area don’t recognize the two, they may remember hearing them.
“As you probably heard last night,” Sean tells me, referring to when I stopped by his corner the day before for the new issue, “I yell when I sell.” And yell Sean does, shouting “Street Roots, only a dollar!” over the din of business as usual downtown. Sean grins, “She says you can hear me yelling two blocks away.” Rebecca, on the other hand, takes an almost opposite approach to selling.
“I’m one of those people who will just say hi to everybody as they pass,” says Rebecca. “And it’s easier to do when you don’t have a crowd of 20 or 30 people.” And while Rebecca admires Sean’s selling style, saying he sounds like an old-fashioned, city paper peddler, she prefers to stick to her own methods. “I really can’t do the yelling because my voice doesn’t carry like his does,” says Rebecca. “I prefer to just say hi to the kids and the people walking by, saying, ‘How’s your day?’”
The two switch on and off, giving each other breaks before frustration or fatigue can get the best of them.
“I’m better when it’s slower. He’s better when it’s real busy,” Rebecca says. “We’ve kind of got our times, in a sense.” Rebecca and Sean have developed their strategy with Street Roots over the past five months and have established themselves among the many attractions the Pioneer Square blocks have to offer. The area’s competition is what first inspired Sean to use his voice to sell the paper.
“When I first started selling the papers I would just stand there like everybody else does and I noticed across me was a guitar player, on the other side was a drummer, and across on the other side was a bagpipe player,” Sean says. He realized he had to be more noticeable. So far, Sean has received nothing but positive feedback from his customers. “People come up and say, ‘I like the way you sell,’” he says. “So I just kind of stuck with it.”
Even off their turf the two work as a team, pooling their earnings and saving up to be able to go out on small dates. “Just to have a sense of normalcy,” Sean says. “Like this Christmas we saved up to get her her phone.”
“Just the little things,” adds Rebecca. Sean, an Arizona native, and Rebecca, originally from a small town in Wisconsin, first met a year and a half ago in Tampa, Fla. The two have been inseparable ever since. Sean and Rebecca moved to Portland where Sean could have easier access to resources and support for his diabetes. More than that, however, they are in love with Portland. “Everyone’s just so friendly here,” says Sean.
You can catch the couple on their turf at SW Fifth Avenue and Morrison Street every day from noon to 6 p.m. And if you can’t remember where to find them, just head towards Pioneer Square and listen for Sean’s pitch.