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• Image via Etsy

Well, far be it for me to begrudge anyone their weird side-hustle. Rent is high and the economy’s still rough for most people. And, as Gothamist points out, Justing Gignac’s “cube of NYC garbage” thing has been successfully going for a while now, though that actually does qualify as a fairly interesting art project. This new thing? It is literally a pebble in a plastic box. But it’s a Brooklyn pebble.

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Floyd Hayes, a UK-to-Brooklyn transplant who’s been peddling the “piece of Brooklyn” rocks on Etsy for $4 apiece, markets them as a “100% genuine Piece of Brooklyn as hand-picked from the streets of the coolest borough in the world.”

From the Etsy description:

For the price of a cup of joe, people can now have their very own, 100% genuine piece of Brooklyn and contribute to the creative energy the borough is famous for.

Each piece is totally unique and would make the perfect fun gift or keepsake.

So! I guess we could get up in arms about this as an avatar of something or other—capitalism? Etsy? the relentless, soul-deadening culture of “branding?”—but then, Hayes is donating $1 from each sale to the Brooklyn Arts Council, which is a pretty nice thing to do. Also (and maybe more importantly), as of this posting, it appears that only four of these have been sold so far. Seems pretty manageable to me.

Follow Virginia K. Smith on Twitter @vksmith.