My Little Entrepreneur

I have two daughters.  One is 12 (going on 16) and the other is 8.  My youngest is Gillian, who loves to come up with money making schemes.  The trouble is she doesn’t quite grasp the concept.

The first time she decided to start her own business, she set up a lemonade stand in our driveway.  Of course, she decided to do it in the early afternoon… on a weekday.  There wasn’t a soul in our neighborhood.  I think only one car even drove by in the hour she was out there.  I was out there washing my truck and luckily I had recently taken the Light Rail and had a pocket full of dollar coins.  So, I drank the whole gallon of lemonade myself and paid her a $1 for each glass.

I came home a few weeks ago and she was outside with the neighbor girls behind a card table selling “ice cold” water and snacks.  I found out they were doing pretty brisk business – selling the water for a dime and full snack bags of Nutter Butters or Ritz Bitz for a quarter.  The neighbor girls supplied the products.  Her “share” of the profits was about $1.30.  I figured that my neighbor’s had NOT given their daughters permission to sell their snacks – so I made Gillian give the money back.  I tried to explain that selling snack bags that cost 60 cents each for 25 was bad business.  Boy was she pissed!

To somewhat make amends and to teach her a lesson in economics, I took her to the grocery store to bankroll the next sale.  First, we bought some frosted cupcake cookies.  20 cookies for $3.50.  I told her these were a premium item and that she should charge a quarter a piece, thus netting a nice $1.50 profit.  We also bought a package of 3 dozen Double Stuff Oreos for $2.99.  This is the item to get people coming to the stand… and at a dime each; they’d still make a little profit.  Where they make the pure profit is on the water/lemonade at ten cents a glass.  Honestly, who can eat cookies without washing it down?  Confident I had instilled some economic knowledge into my young daughter, we went home with our purchases.

The next day I came home from work to find all the neighborhood kids congregated in my yard.  My chest puffed out with pride as I thought of the life lessons and money making savvy I had passed on to my daughter.  When she came in the house a few hours later I asked how much money she had made.  NOTHING!  She and the other girls gave everything away to their friends or pigged out on the cookies themselves!  So all they got for their labor was a stomach ache.

…and I’m out six bucks.

Mr. Fix-it

This was my role yesterday afternoon after work. I came home from vacation to find someone had broken one of my driveway lights and stolen another. Then I let the dog out and saw that my backyard fence had literally separated and was falling down. Nice.

The lights were only a small problem. The problem being that I had bought them as a set and had no spares. I bought a new set of four, installed them, and put the remaining two (from the old set – that worked) somewhere else in the yard.

The fence was a bit more of a dilemma. I live on a corner lot, so one side of my fence borders the road. That one is all mine. The one on the north side borders my next door neighbor, who is awesome. The back fence borders some dude who owns a bunch of rentals (that house included). He obviously doesn’t screen his renters because they always end up getting evicted after about six months and trashing the place. The neighbors and I have had to call the city on him may times between renters because he does nothing to take care of the property. So… this fence is going to be “my” problem. He won’t fix it and won’t contribute any money to the project either. The fence is probably 12 years old and although made with treated lumber, it runs north/south and gets buffeted by the gale force Colorado winds year round. What to do? I called my dad for advice.

After a brief assessment of the situation, dad had the perfect solution and I put it into action yesterday. I went Lowe’s and picked up about $15 worth of hardware. After propping the fence up with a brace, I used some new “bigger” wood screws to reattach the fence sections to the post. I knew this would only be a temporary fix though, so I bought a 4′ length of flat metal, carriage bolts, washers, nuts, etc. Dad suggested that if I braced the horizontal brace boards with metal – they wouldn’t be able to bend and break again. Worked like a charm.

The funny thing is I did all the work while the new neighbors (who just moved in over the weekend) were away from home. They’ll probably think their worthless landlord fixed it. LOL.