This is actually brilliant foreshadowing. Much as this short sucks and is totally out of place in the game, you soon meet a patent medicine salesman who might be one of the worst and most annoying in Rockstar's history of really shitty and annoying characters.
I live in Edinburgh and walk past Rockstar North every day. They could throw a stone from their office and hit a better writer than the one they have, even if that stone just hits the homeless guy who busks there.