Zoomdoggle: More fun than work!

For days now we’ve been talking about making our own luck and, even better, distributing it to others. The day has come. Actually, the day was a few days back, but here’s what we did.

STEP 1: $50 in pennies. That’s 5,000 tiny chances to make a difference.

STEP 2: We affixed little messages to the underside (the “tails” side) using spray adhesive and gobs, and gobs, of patience. For 5,000 pennies, this part took some 50 hours of labor.

STEP 3: Distribution. As the saying goes, only a penny found “heads-up” is good luck. That means the message side goes on the ground.

It took almost 5 hours to spread them throughout the city (with an emphasis on Williamsburg, The East Village, Soho, and Nolita). But we learned lots of interesting stuff:

1. A lone penny is more likely to be picked up then a penny placed in a group (we spelled some things out on the ground - those things were still there the next day).

2. People instantly understand what it is you’re doing when you put a penny down… and they smile. This alone makes all the effort worthwhile.

3. People are almost twice as likely to pick up a penny in Soho than they are in Williamsburg (we staked a few out to come up with these numbers).

4. Drop a penny on the ground from about waist height and more often then not it will actually come to lay head-side-down. This could have something to do with the messages we’d placed on them, or the weight of the head. Either way, it happened so often we began to wonder how fair a coin-toss actually is.

5. Homeless people aren’t nearly as interested in pennies as one might think. In fact, they find them borderline insulting.

6. While locals ask what you’re doing when they see you placing change on the ground, foreigners simply offer you more change. One German group explained that this was because every bill they’d gotten ended in 99 cents, leaving them with a pocket full of coins they had no use for.

7. Advertising online starts at about a nickel per click. This cost just one cent per message. The metrics don’t quite add up that way, but the face remains, yesterday (the day we spread the luck) was out best traffic day yet. That said, it was well worth the effort. From here on out we’ll be distributing $5 in pennies per week. That’s 500 hand-labeled coins. If you find one, pick it up. And drop us a line.

As long as we were out there, we asked some people what the luckiest thing was that had happened to them that day was. It was fairly interesting.

What’s the luckiest thing that’s happened to you so far today?