Really business as usual

So you think you know what the world’s oldest profession is? Well, I am here to challenge that myth. I believe that the oldest and longest-running profession is selling lemonade. I am not talking about soda fountains or juice bars with 60 kinds of fruit drinks, or even general stores that sell everything.

I am talking about the traditional (understatement) lemonade stand, the one where the entrepreneurs are all under the age of eight, and the establishment consists of a fruit box or a chair with a pitcher of lemonade, some cups piled upside down on the “counter” and the poster with scrawled crayon letters that roughly read “lemonade 25 cents,” or denari, or euros, or round stones, or whatever is appropriate.

I expect that lemonade stands have been around at least as long as there have been lemons. And considering that probably no one has ever made any money selling lemonade, that is a long time.

How do kids manage to get the resources and the permission from their parents to set up shop? If the parents aren’t actually complicit, they must at least have noticed when their kids started pillaging the family stores for cups and Kool-aid or started moving the furniture outside.

Well, actually it’s easy for kids to get adults on board with this project. Parents concoct an idea of their own—they will use this opportunity to teach their little budding capitalists about business practices—assets, profit margins, production, etc.

By the time they find out that the kids don’t want to build a business model, it’s too late. Kids are only interested in gross income. They don’t want to learn about production costs or profit margins. So the parents shrug and settle. Maybe by default the kids will learn something about supply and demand.

So like smart little entrepreneurs, they get their production materials donated. Mom would rather raid the cupboards than go to the store with a bunch of overexcited kids who have no investment capital anyway.

With all aspects of the business model except a passion to be lemonade tycoons abandoned, they plunge ahead. They stir up lemonade under conditions for which the health department was invented, and they carry it outside. Here are some business ventures that I remember:

One day this last March, while driving through my daughter’s neighborhood, I was shivering and complaining about the falling snow while wishing that I had a nice drink of hot chocolate to warm me up. We noticed some activity ahead on the sidewalk that did not look like children making snowmen. You guessed it—the children had set up shop. They were probably able to offer lemonade without ice that day, thus cutting overhead costs considerably.

My grandson’s business model calls for running world’s biggest and best lemonade stand. He has gathered the production resources for a high-end stand where he will sell Brazilian Lemonade. He even understands that he needs a hot day on which to sell it. He is still waiting for a hot day though.

My nieces had a good idea for overcoming the problem of selling on a high-speed street. (They employed some sophisticated advertising techniques whether they realized it or not.) In order to get potential buyers to notice their stand and not drive on by before they knew what they were missing, they positioned one little salesperson 50 yards ahead of the stand. Her job was to jump up and down and in exaggerated forms of American Sign Language convey the message “lemonade stand up ahead on the right,” thus giving passersby time to slow down and pull over. I’m a little challenged with ASL myself, but maybe someone got the message. Their idea must at least partially comply with non-discrimination guidelines though.

I remember trying to sell lemonade once when I was a kid. We lived in Dry Fork, or the hinterlands as it was known then. My mom tried to teach me about “location, location, location,” but I must have thought that if I built it, they would come. I had a little table and a chair and I sat on my chair all afternoon. About three cars passed by and none stopped. I had to bring my lemonade back inside and serve it for supper. No one paid me for it either, which may have been a violation of child labor laws.

Actually, I would be very surprised if there aren’t applicable regulations governing the sale of lemonade from roadside stands. Probably kids should just give their lemonade away as they have always done. Otherwise they may find out that the business-model part would be the least of their headaches when operating in today’s business environment.