Anyone run a lemonade stand in their driveway on a sunny summer afternoon in days of yore? I recall running one where we sold lime Kool Aid and charged 25 cents a cup. I believe we cleared $1.50 that afternoon. I also remember getting into a fight with the neighbor kid/friend who helped run it, over how to split the proceeds, as one of us did considerably more ‘selling’ than the other.
But what money making enterprises did you engage in as a pre-teen? paper routes? shoveling snow off sidewalks? washing cars?
My cousins and I sold vegetables from the garden from the fromt yard one afternoon which probably kept us out of my aunt’s hair dlfor a few hours and scored us $3.15 which eas big money in 1975.
My grandfather/family built a 240 lot mobile home park. My family did not live there, but took care of a lot of things. My dad sold mobile homes.
So I started working early. About ~ 11 years old. This would be 1971. Mostly landscaping to get grass growing on the lots. And mowing as well. Lots and lots and lots of mowing. And anything else they might point me at to get done. My brother (at a mature 15) and I dug trenches and installed many a gas line.
I made $1/hour, which was serious coin for a kid back then.
Two of my siblings had the paper route for our tiny town. Sis took over for our brother, the pain in the ass, when he graduated high school; she took me on her route a couple of times.
I did the car wash thing but that was to raise money for various organizations I belonged to, not for personal gain. Being close to 6’ by the time I was twelve, I was practically the only one around who could reach roofs without assistance, unless a van came along.
I saw multiple kiddie lemonade stands in my tiny town over the Summer, it was adorable. The one on the main thoroughfare seemed to be doing brisk business. I was pleasantly surprised, I thought such things were relics of a half-imagined past these days.
Did the lemonade stand only once, on an unusually warm Anchorage summer day. Can’t remember if we made any money or not, although it seems people were kinder to kids back then.
When I was six or seven - so, 1977 or 1978 - a friend and I did a lemonade stand. We were well positioned to do so. This was a time when there were long lines at gas stations, and such a line went right in front of my friend’s house. We would walk up and down the street, asking people if they wanted lemonade, and bring it to them. Ten cents a cup.
As I recall, being that young, we got bored with the whole thing rather quickly, and stopped after a few days.
I think I may have had a lemonade stand once and very unsuccessfully. My kids have tried it with little more success in our sparsely populated neighborhood.
But a couple of local kids have shown true genius !
Our local landfill is at the end of a quarter-mile road, and last summer they set up a stand on the “leaving” side of the road a short distance outside the gate. They seem to do a very brisk business.
I set up the occasional cool-aid stand. Usually when some construction was happening on my street. Mowed an occasional lawn but did a lot of weeding flower beds. Paper routes and keeping score at the bowling alley were my primary source of income. I would earn free tickets for roller skating, bowling and the movies by doing clean up chores. My favorite business was selling frogs, toads and lizards to people and building them habitats in back yards. I collected coke bottles and scrap metal. I sold homemade pot holders and aprons door to door and also standing out in front of the local grocery store. One of my most interesting jobs was fixing washing machines for a man that had a washing machine rental business. He delivered appliances for a local appliance store, and he would bring home the old washers which I would either part out or repair.
Near Christmastime, I would pull down mistletoe from trees in our local mountains when my family would go there on road trips. I’d then tie it in little bunches with bright red ribbon and sell them door to door. I can’t remember how much I made, but it was enough to make me do it two Christmases in a row. This would have been about 1967 or so.
It was probably illegal to harvest mistletoe in a picnic or camping ground, but I didn’t know it at the time and no one approached to stop me.
For my 11th birthday, I got a Sears gas-powered lawn mower from my parents (arranged by my stepfather). It was not self-propelled and had no safety features whatsoever. You shut it off by flipping a metal piece to ground the spark plug.
This might sound like a lame birthday present, but I loved it. I made a lot of money (for a kid, anyway) with it. Initially we lived in Alameda, California and I could get $5 for mowing a smallish lawn. I didn’t have a regular client base, but just mowed lawns here and there. I remember I had about $150 in savings when we moved a year later.
A couple of years later, we lived in rural Tennessee. We lived on a street that had 3/4-acre lots on our side of the street. I mowed our lawn every week for free (and in exchange for gasoline and other mower expenses) plus the three houses around us for $10 per lawn. And also did edging with a string trimmer. So I was making about $30/week, which was decent spending money for a 13-year old then.
There was also a farmer across the street who had a lawn that was more than an acre, plus he would only pay $5, so I avoided mowing his lawn to the extent possible.
My parents in Connecticut hire a service to mow the lawn and clear the snow off the driveway. Ideally, some kid on the street would be able to do both, using their parents’ equipment but there are few kids on their street now and none seem interested.
And the stereotypical lemonade stand has a kid making it from scratch from actual lemons and sugar but doing so is a ton of work and expensive. So are kids just selling powered lemonade today?
I have noted this as well. Our son happens to have an entrepreneurial spirit, and took advantage of this fact and really cleaned up one summer in middle school with lawn mowing in the neighborhood. I gather many folks were willing to pay him rather generously simply because they’d rather see the money go to an ambitious kid in the neighborhood than some landscape company.
I ran a few lemonade / Kool-Aid stands with my siblings as a kid in the '80s. We’d gross between $5-8 each time, usually. Always on summer day that was good and hot.
We were using powdered drink mix back then too. We’d cut a lemon and put the slices in the pitcher for pizzaz, but nobody I knew was making pitchers of lemonade completely from scratch.
Had a couple paper routes both for the am paper and the pm paper.
The business model was you were given a geographical territory to manage. You were then in charge of maintaining, growing, and managing the customer base there. Once you knew how many papers you needed that day you would go to a centralized location and had to buy the papers from the company at a discount rate, load them on your bike and go deliver them. On weekends you would go house to house of your customers to “collect” payment for that weeks papers. The difference between what you paid for the papers and what they sold for was your profit.
I shoveled snow for a few years. Me and a few friends went door to door after a big snows and basically had as many customers as we wanted … for one day. One poor lady called my parents asking if I could come clear her driveway for a few years after I’d moved away.
I weeded and cleared the badly neglected yard of an elderly shut-in widow a few days a week one summer.
Some onesie twosie garage and shed painting jobs.
When I was in 7th grade until a bit into high school, I distributed fliers on doors for a local housepainting company during summers. It was a very weird deal, an older guy would pick up me and three other tweenaged boys, drive us to some suburb we hadn’t heard of, and basically cut us loose on a neighborhood with a stack of photocopied papers. I think we got $20 for 200 houses? Angry dogs, pissed off homeowners, bees, sneaking drinks of water from strangers’ garden hoses, creeps, cops … all hazards the intrepid flier guy must overcome.
I got my first real job when I was 15. I had to get a work permit approved by school and my parents.
Some friends and I picked saskatoon berries one summer. It was a good year for them and we lived near the edge of town; the berry bushes were all over the edge of the farms in the area. We’d spend 4 hours picking in the morning, weigh them into bags and then literally go door to door like vacuum salesmen with our wares.
I have no recollection of my parents being involved whatsoever.