If his experience was like mine, he also learned that a surprising number of people are lying slimeballs when it comes to debts. Learning not to trust anyone on money issues is a great lesson for adulthood.
Whoa! Lemonade stands are a minimum of $1 around here. But of course we live in FancyTown. Not only do we call ourselves Lexus Nexus, people actually get the joke.
My daughter insisted on doing fresh squeezed lemonade ten years ago. With simple syrup. She cleaned up though. People were chucking fivers into her jar and saying keep the change.
I did a paper route. My house was not on a high traffic street, so a lemonade stand would not have worked.
However my friend and I did a raffle for Unicef, where we sold tickets we made ourselves. We did give the prize we promised, and we too the profits to the Pepsi pavilion at the NY World’s Fair (where It’s a Small World premiered) and gave it to a somewhat bemused worker. Maybe doesn’t count since we didn’t make any money off of this.
I had a Kool-Aid stand a couple of times as a kid, then started babysitting. One woman paid me minimum wage–more than three dollars an hour? I was thrilled. Then my mother told her it was too much! (Mom’s ideas of what a sitter should be paid were formed from her own days of doing that in the Great Depression.) Fortunately, the lady insisted.
My husband tried selling eggs and peacock feathers (his family had one) but they had so little traffic on the rural road they lived on that it didn’t work.
I have vivid memories of making lemonade with my brother with the goal of setting up a lemonade stand, but I don’t think we ever followed through with any selling (or, very likely, we had no customers). I was too shy to be good at sales, and my mom was reluctant to encourage me to bug adults, so that may have been it.
In high school, I babysat, and I got some pretty devoted clients. The fact that I started out charging 50 cents an hour and was too timid to ask for a raise after demand for my services increased may have been a factor.
My best friend and I tried collecting recyclables and taking them in. After a while, we had quite a few regular clients. We would pick up their paper and aluminum cans and drive them in her used Galaxie 500 to the recycling place. They’d pay us a pittance, and we’d take it to the gas station and spend it on more gas (and oil) so we could do it again. It took us far too long to realize that this was not a great use of time.
I babysat too, and made a lot doing that. Most of my first clients were people on my paper route-- I have my first babysitting job when I was only 11 or 12, but that was normal then. Now, people get sitters FOR their 12-yr-olds.
I did my very best at it-- I always played games with the kids before bedtime, and read bedtime stories-- I was very good at reading aloud. I was just a good reader, and had been reading to my brother since I was five and he was old enough to sit up. I put them to bed, tucked them in.
I followed all the parents’ directions to a T, and I don’t think I ever once had to call parents for assistance on anything. I also brought my own snacks, and never ate the family’s food, except this one family that always made a point of having something for me, and it seemed at that point rude not to eat it.
Parents passed my name around, and I could have sat virtually every night, but my parents had a few rules, like not sitting past 9:30 on school nights, and if I wasn’t doing my homework there, I’d not be allowed to sit on school nights anymore.
Most parents paid me about $2-3 an hour for one kind, and another dollar for additional kids. The federal minimum wage most of the time I was sitting was about $3, so it was pretty good money.
One family I sat for a lot called me about 6pm one evening to ask if I could come over immediately, as they had to take one child to the emergency room, and wanted to know if i could stay with their other two so both parents could go.
I could, and went right over.
Their son had croup, and ended up being admitted. The dad was home a little after 10pm, and I was asleep on the couch with the TV on. He woke me, and apologized for not being able to drive me home because he had to stay with the other kids, since his wife was still at the hospital-- he always drove me home, even though I just lived a couple of blocks away, said I was fine to walk. That night, he made me call my parents for a ride.
My parents knew that their son was in the hospital, and were not the least bit upset about me getting home late. I was very lucky to have parents that were reasonable about things like that.
What a great and industrious idea for kids. Take what’s essentially a free resource and add a little labor value and, voila, profit. Capitalism at its purest.
Today? I would say easily a buck. I don’t know how old the OP is, but guessing at median ages on the Dope, that 25 cents a cup, were it back in 1980, is equivalent to one dollar today.
I would pay up to maybe $1.50. Eh, probably two, cuz I like seeing entrepreneurial moxie! Now, if they were selling fresh-squeezed, you can double those prices at least for me.
Lemonade in our neighborhood was $2 or $3 this last summer. But they are all fundraisers, not going into the pockets of the kids. They are often also selling cookies at fancy bakery prices.
Our son used to run a concession stand one day of the year when he was in middle school. We live next to a school that hosts a regional running event that draws thousands of participants. On this one day of the year each fall, he would set up his card table and sell his wares. Our house is literally next door to the event and we have thousands of pedestrians walk past. The first year he did it on a lark and literally sold lemonade. We had two cans of frozen concentrate lemonade and he sold out in about 30 minutes. He decided to go all in the next year. We fronted him the money to purchase cups and napkins, and product, and allowed him to use items we almost never used, such as a 30-cup coffee urn. He sold candy, donuts, cider, coffee, hot coco, bottled water and pop the second year. I was interested in how he wanted to run his business model, so asked him some questions and made suggestions on mark up pricing. That second year he spent $50 on product but netted over $500 that day. Sold out on most items. The following year he took notes on what items sold better and worse the previous year and ended up clearing just short of $700. After 8th grade he lost the ‘cute kid factor’ and didn’t have the interest to do it again. Which I confess as a parent actually made ME feel some disappointment.
I recall quite a few people would just hand him like $5 bills and tell him to keep the change. We had labelled his concession stand that year “Johnny’s College Fund”. One year as I was helping carry out a batch of coffee we’d made, I saw a gentleman driving a BMW, pull over when he saw people lined up at his table, got out and said to our son “I’m an entrepreneur. I like it when I see kids taking initiative to succeed in business. I’m giving you $20 because I want to see you continue to make that effort throughout your life.” I guess it must have made an impression because our son just turned 18 and runs various side hustles with a passion.
My “enterprise” was a paper route. It was a job that found me, not the other way around. For whatever reason there was a sudden need for someone to do the route in my neighbourhood, so I was recruited right off the street on my way home from school. As I recall, it wasn’t all that onerous, and some of the tips were pretty generous (at the time, the paperboy was responsible for collecting and submitting the subscription fees, I think weekly). I was interested in photography and thanks to the job I could afford a really good 35mm camera that was my pride and joy for years.
It’s great to have parents like that who work with you.
My mother sort of wanted me to get a summer job, but it was my father who stepped up and pointed out that I was making over $3.00/hour babysitting when the minimum wage in 1969 was just $1.30. He even got some of his bowling buddies to hire me for jobs.
The biggest night each year was New Year’s Eve. I’d get booked for that by mid-summer. I’d end up staying at the customer’s house until 2:00AM or so and almost always got a couple twenties. (Again, the minimum wage was just $1.30 at that time.)
I’m in awe of your parenting. I didn’t receive that kind of guidance growing up and didn’t give it to my kids either.
I reckon around here you’d get a copper coming around pretty soon asking you for your Common Victualler’s License.
A lemonade stand on a side street will skate. A cop might even come by and buy a cup. But anything that resembles real commerce…
Some cities/towns are real hard-asses about that vendor’s license and will even have the cops shut down a kid’s lemonade stand and issue fines. Enough that Country Time has a “Legal-Ade” fund to pay the fines:
It is. My parents had their weirdnesses, and I certainly found plenty to bitch about as a teen-- and the one real complaint, that I got virtually no affection from, I at least got from an aunt, and they encouraged the relationship-- even let me live with my aunt and uncle for a while.
MP Shirley Williams (RIP, recently) once described her mother’s parenting (her mother was Vera Brittain, the author of Testament of Youth) as “remote, but effective.” I feel that.
When I was in high school a few friends and I would host pasture parties outside of town. We’d buy a couple of kegs,say $25-30 each, and then sell red solo cups to party goers for $3 bucks a piece. We’d get about 100-150 kids show up and clear more than $300 for the night.
We probably did this about 3-4 times a year. Never got busted.
Boy, this one’s got some outlaw luster.