Periscope
Control of street promotion urged to cut nuisance
(continued from previous page...)
Public's mixed reactions
Pedestrians whom Varsity has spoken to said they had become used to street promotions. Some people, however, said they did not know whether such activities were legal or not.
¡§They (street promotion activities) have been there for a long time. I don¡¦t know whether they are permitted to do so or not,¡¨ university student Jodie Wong Hoi-nam said.
Tracy Cheung Wai-ting, another university student who worked as a street promoter for a phone company during the summer holiday three years ago, said she had mixed feelings towards street pitches.
On the one hand, she said she noticed that Sai Yeung Choi Street South remained very congested even after it was designated as a pedestrian area. ¡§To some extent, it is those salespeople who block the road,¡¨ she said.
On the other hand, Miss Cheung said she found street promotion could be beneficial to customers as well.
¡§Whenever you want to register for any of those services, you would immediately think of Mong Kok,¡¨ she said.
But Stella So Lai-man, an associate professor of the marketing department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong , said most people had no plan to buy the services or products promoted in the street and thus they would find such promotion activities a nuisance.
Varsity has approached some of the companies which conduct street promotion, but all of them declined to comment about the nuisance problem.
Both Lee Kin Driving School and a customer service executive of PCCW Limited said they could not reveal any commercial information. Other companies including Hong Kong School of Motoring, i-CABLE Communications Limited and New World Telecommunications Limited, gave no replies to Varsity.
