As a child I always thought of myself as a great entrepreneur – the world was my oyster (ugh) and there was money to be made! All I had to do was come up with the perfect business model. For a time I tried selling homemade potpourri that I made from my mom’s flowers that I baked on a cookie sheet with cinnamon. Needless to say, it was a bust.
Then it was hocking homemade stationary to my dad’s patients at his office. I drew a grid on a fresh sheet of lined notebook paper and colored samples of my work in each square, so my future customers could easily choose their stationary of choice: Yes, I will have 16 sheets of #3 with the red polka dots and 5 of #147 with the psychedelic scribbles. Please and thank you. I had my plan mapped out and would be a bajillionare by the time I turned 8. I neatly placed my sample pages and marketing materials in my “Ski hard or go home” Trapper-Keeper binder that I borrowed from my cool older brother and sent it off with my dad to his office. I was confident that he only had to set it out at the reception desk and my customers would flock like bees to a dripping honeycomb.
Shockingly, that was not the case. In fact, I believe my parents were the only ones to purchase any pages. Deflated I moved on to a car wash, a bake sale and finally the classic lemonade stand. But even that did not happen as planned considering people kept ordering iced tea. Flustered, I would emphasize the fact that this was a LEMONADE STAND YOU IDIOTS. It wasn’t until late that afternoon that a polite patron quietly pointed out that the plastic pitcher I was serving my lemonade from had an old strip of masking on the side labeled “iced tea” that you could see from the road – it was obviously left over from the last church potluck. Thanks, Mom! Gosh! But by the end of that sweaty summer afternoon I collected about $10. Not bad, however I remember questioning the return on my effort…
These young memories of adventures in money came rushing back a couple of weeks ago when I was running out of my apartment building to work. I rounded the corner and was checking email on my phone when I noticed a young boy standing outside of a building on my street. He was well dressed in his buttoned up polo shirt and dockers. His glasses were slightly askew as his high pitched voice called out to the passersby – Grass for sale! Come and get your fresh picked grass! 25 cents a clump! Well, curiosity got the best of me and I simply had to stop to see if my eyes were tricking me. Nope! He was selling neatly tied bundles of grass on a busy New York City street, in lieu of lemonade. But hey, what a deal! 25 cents for a clump of green grass freshly plucked from the mall in Central Park. And I didn’t even have to walk the four blocks to get it myself.
I was completely dumbstruck with how different our childhoods are/were, his and mine. I grew up in a town where having a large yard and woods to play in was commonplace. Conversely, he is sitting on a goldmine of opportunity in the selling of grass in the midst of an enormous city made almost entirely of concrete. Genius! Maybe I should join his enterprise! Oh, to be a child again… but then I watched another young boy try to catch a rat the size of Miss Bianca at the park to play with last night and I decided maybe I’ll stick with my memories from the Midwest. Just saying.
That is so funny!