July 4 Watermelon Promotion Turns Out to Be a Real Lemon

If your July 4 was less than idyllic, stop complaining. Just consider Syd Leibovitch: His day off was really the pits.

Leibovitch is a 24-year-old Northridge real estate broker with a flair for promotion who drove around town on Independence Day with 7,000 pounds of watermelons on a flatbed truck, dropping them off one by one on local doorsteps with flyers bearing his picture and the message “Happy 4th of July, Compliments of Syd Leibovitch, Country Club Properties.”

Leibovitch and his sweltering assistants had distributed nearly 500 of the 750 watermelons they had scrambled to acquire earlier in the day when, finally, an astute homeowner stopped them.

“Syd, you’d better come in here,” Leibovitch remembers the man saying.

$1,500 Out the Window

That was when Leibovitch heard that watermelons were being recalled for possible pesticide contamination. At first, there was confusion about whether all watermelons were risky, or just those from Vons supermarkets. Leibovitch breathed a sigh of relief: his watermelons had come from a Lucky supermarket.

But his luck didn’t hold. After many frantic phone calls, it became clear that it didn’t matter where the melons came from. Despite spending more than $1,500 of his own money on the stunt, a change of plans was in order.

“My first concern is that nobody would die or anything,” he explained. “That’s not the best publicity.”

So Leibovitch set about recovering the watermelons, a task that soon proved impossible. Darkness was falling, and residents of the neighborhood between Tampa and Corbin avenues, and Plummer and Devonshire streets were in no mood for strangers bearing wild tales of watermelons and real estate.

“You have no idea how long it takes to knock on a door, explain that you left the watermelon, that you want it back and that you’re not going to rob them,” Leibovitch said.

He only got back about 50, and so went home and typed up another flyer, this one warning about the melons. At 4:30 a.m. Friday, he was driving around and dropping off those flyers at the same houses he had visited the first time around.

“I in no way intended to poison people,” he said.

But Leibovitch was still stuck with quite a few watermelons. He found Lucky reluctant to take them back, and he didn’t want to insist, he said, because the store had been so nice in helping him get all those melons in the first place. Leibovitch pointed out that obtaining 750 melons on July 4, a day when the gigantic fruits are as popular as eggs at Easter, was no easy matter.

Dumps Melons

Disposal was a problem too. Leibovitch finally dropped the melons in several trash receptacles around town, and then called it quits, except to worry that someone might sue him if they got sick.

The disappointment was especially bitter after last year’s sweet success with watermelons, when the same promotional gambit on July 4 brought in dozens of calls and cards, Leibovitch said. He also ran a free turkey contest last Thanksgiving.

So has Syd Leibovitch, who estimates he has sold $3.8-million worth of houses in Northridge this year alone, given up on watermelons as a way to make friends and influence people? Will he ever try it again?

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I’m skeptical.”