RBR: Boom and Bust - At the age of 10, my first business
RBR: Boom and Bust - At the age of 10, my first business
THE BACKGROUND
I have to start by indicating that my father's business (buy cheap sell dear) was my first influence. He was in the burlap bag business. He started off years ago by going to farms and buying from the farmers their empty feed bags cheap, cleaning them with a big suction machine that spewed pollution throughout the area while turning the bags inside out. Then he would print them with the logo and brand that a buyer wanted, bale them up and ship them out. Then he went to the wineries and bought their emptied raw sugar bags, that were made from a stronger heavier kind of burlap or sisal. Those still had sticky sugar remaining in them, so it was necessary to wash them, so they were taken to the beach, soaked in the lake and spread out on the sand to dry. A problem arose when some mother complained that her kiids came home sticky and smelling sweet from swimming near the bags, so from then on they had to be washed in big drums of water. Those washed heavy bags would then have the string seams opened, and were cut and sewn into smaller sizes, and then printed for foundries to hold metal fittings. Eventually my father would import bales of new burlap bolts from India and make new bags from them. My father built the business from a small building with a couple of employees to a big factory with 18 employees, two trucks and towmotors to move the bales around. My father retired as a self-made millionaire having originally immigrated to Canada with 13 cents in his pocket. It was a good thing that he retired, because reinforced plastics were starting to be used for bags, so he sold the business just in time.
THE CONCEPT
When I was a kid I spent my summers at my grandmother's cottage on the Burlington Beach strip, which is a narrow strip of land separating Lake Ontario from Hamilton Bay at the far western limit of Lake Ontario, running from Burlington on the north end to Hamilton on the south. There was a two-lane road running through that was part of the Queen Elizabeth Way that connected Toronto to Niagara Falls, and a railway track that I would put pennies on to flatten them out. All along the strip there were cottages and year-round homes.
One day, a man with a truck came by and asked if we had any used baskets to sell, and he would pay 2 cents for each one. In those days people bought fruit and vegetables by the basket, keeping the baskets. They looked like this, only they had a handle that was a strip of wood, not wire. Four of them could be shoved together like a square, and that way stacked up on their sides.
Like a flash of lightning it hit me (having learned from my father's business) that if I could buy baskets for 1 cent each I could sell them to that man for 2 cents and make 1 cent each. It was better than gathering up a few glass pop (soda) bottles on the beach and selling them to a store for 2 cents each, ending up with a dime or so, although a dime could buy an ice cream cone back then. I ran over to Jerry's house (he lived on the next little street where his father's cottage backed up on ours). Jerry was 2 years older than me and we became partners. We got on our bikes and stopped at the houses and with our little savings of 10 cents each we were able to buy 20 baskets. We zipped back to where the man was slowly progressing and sold him the baskets for 40 cents. Then back we went, back and forth, constantly doubling our money. Eventually we were able to amass about 320 baskets, stacked up behind my grandmother's cottage........and the man had disappeared. We were devestated. We had even lost our original investment pf 20 cents. It was going to rain so my father sent his truck to pick up the baskets but the cost of doing that exceeded the $6.40 we could have sold the baskets for.
THE RESULT
We thought we were going to be rich, and we ended up losing what we started with. A boom and then a bust.
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RED BOX RULES: Anything to do with politics, including but not limited to mentioning Trump, Obama, Clinton, Republicans, Democrats, liberals, progressives, conservatives, right wing, Nazis, KKK, Anti-fa, alt-right, Fascism, Communism, Race, Ethnicity, Religion, will be considered off topic and will be deleted. CoC violations and any disobeying of the Terms of Use are not permitted and will be dealt with accordingly. Otherwise please try to stick to posting comments about the article, and about whatever business you yourselves may have tried to do when you were a young kid.
Now, who has had an interesting business experience while still a young kid? Let's hear about it.
It took me 10 minutes to read the RBR's Buzz. I'll do my best not to violate any of them. Kavika carefully walks through the mine field.
The area that I grew up in had many lakes and was a fisherman's paradise. So being the brilliant little kids that we were what could be better than a bait business for all the fisherman. Minnows and worms a kids delight.
We had to figure out if we were going to go wholesale or retail...Most of the gas stations in the are were also bait shops so we figured (we being me and my two brothers and a couple of cousins) we'd sell to the gas stations.
My cousins uncle, also my uncle and everyone else's uncle. (all Indians are related) owned a gas station and sold bait. We approached him with our plan even though he had a regular supplier of minnows. I suppose that he thought he would encourage us by saying that he would buy some of our minnows and all the nightcrawlers. We settled on a price (this is where uncle got us) all minnow were 2 cents and a dozen night crawlers were 5 cents.
Getting the night crawlers wasn't a problem. Every time that it rained they would come out of the ground and we just gathered them up. The minnows were a whole different story. You had to get into the water, and the water temperature in May in northern Minnesota is cold and I mean cold.
We ''borrowed'' our fathers seine net and we set up to the lake to get us some minnows. We had the net and buckets to transport the minnows to uncle Luke's gas station. We soon learned that after netting the minnows that walking a couple of miles with buckets of minnows wasn't all that great. The minnows would run out of oxygen and die.
Uncle Luke came to the rescue when he decided that we were serious and would really supply him with minnows. We would go to the lake net the minnows and Uncle Luke would be there with his pick up and would race back to the his gas station with the minnows.
Of course Uncle Luke was a businessman and would charge us for his time and gas. LOL, lesson one learned. The next lesson learned was that we should not have sold all the minnows for the same price. Some minnows are larger and more popular with the fisherman. Sucker minnows were especially valuable. Again Uncle Luke allowrf us to renegotiate our prices.
So went the summer and we had a nice little business. Every summer for the next couple of years we would start our business in early May and end it around September or so.
Checking to see if I violated any RBR's....Nope, I'm good to go..
Good story, Kavika. And as you can see you actually wrote a few paragraphs without the urge to offend anyone or disobey the RBRs - a great accomplishment on NT these days. Of course no "impasse" was necessary to post as well.
This was my first shot at using RBRs. In the past I once posted GBRs (Green Box Rules - i.e. say anything at all except CoC offences).
Dear Friend Buzz: Abe, a friend, mentor and Gabbai of Anshe Kippel Volin (He called himself a proud Kippler) and I founded our first business in Hebrew School (Cheder).
Each year there would be contracts to sell the Chometz prior to Passover. During the Sferat Ha Omer (Counting of the Sheaths) he and I would save the money we made delivering newspapers, mowing lawns, and any other contracting work for which we could get paid. We tried (wildly unsuccessfully) to corner the market in leavened grains which rise when baked.
The secondary market for Kitniot (beans) was too thin a profit margin.
Our second venture actually did work for awhile. We set up a lab to test for Shotnis (wool mixed with linen) in garments. All we needed was in the Chemistry set I got for Chanukah that year. We priced it using the Keystoning (Pennsyalvania) method. We charged 4 cents price for every 1 cent of cost.
Ultimately synthetic fabrics drove us out of business. I was one year after my Bar Mitzvah when that occurred. Unable to retire, I tried enterprises such as dehydrating and selling powdered water (just add water), using my Father's cellar workshop to make and sell plastic candy dishes, and writing a column for the local town Newspaper (The Chronicle). It was patterend after Rabbi Abraham Shineberg's column in the Forvort Stunde (A Yiddish Newspaper). His column was entitled, "What's the Halacha (Rabbinic Law). Mine was, "What are the Dinim U' Minhagim" (Customs and Traditions). Most of what I wrote was researched from the Kitzur Schulchan Aruch (Code Book of Jewish Law).
This was my favorite childhood to teen age vocation. I got paid for writing about things which fascinated me. That said, I still didn't retire until now in my 70's.
Enoch, Pinching Pennies in Old Age to Keep the Wolves From the Door.
Apologies to you, Enoch, for my deleting both my reply to your story and your reply to mine, as they are both way off topic and I cannot show favouritism in exercising deletions in accordance with my Red Box Rules. Normally, as you know, I welcome, even encourage, tangential comments.
After that debacle I became a delivery boy for the Canadian issues of New Liberty Magazine. I would go around my area on my bicycle, sign people up for subscriptions and then deliver to them the weekly issues. This is the only example of a New Liberty Magazine (Canada) issue I can find - Rita Hayworth is the cover girl:
I have no recollection if I was paid money, but I do recall they gave deliverers a catalogue from which to choose items, based on the number of points we earned for the number of issues we were able to deliver. I don't remember what I chose, but in any event that job may have lasted no more than a year or so, and then I just started working in my father's factory during school holidays.
In order to show no favouritism to me in front of the other employees I was given the most menial and dirtiest jobs to do, like sweeping the floors. I did learn the proper way to sweep from that, not raising clouds of dust. Then I graduated to cleaning the bags on the suction pipe, feeding the printing press, and building by upper body muscles with the manually operated baling press. It looked a little bit like the photo below (although I can't find an actual picture).
I stacked 500 burlap bags in it, and pumped that big handle to push the press down on the bags until they were really tight (putting all my weight on it), then tied the wires around the pressed bale,and then released the pressure. During warm weather I also was the one who had to wash the raw sugar bags - a very sticky job. I worked there every summer (except one) until I got my LL.B., and then I had to article (intern) for a lawyer. From then on I practised law. The one summer I didn't work for my father I worked as a waiter at a summer camp on Skelton Lake in the Muskoka Lakes district of Ontario. It was called Camp Winnebago, and on earlier articles Krishna and I had a lot of discussions about it.
Now I'm REALLY reTIRED.
I guess nobody else on NT had a childhood business experience they want to talk about. I suppose if I changed it to what was your first experience having to do with Politics it might get a lot of single-tracked minds alerted. In fact, I think I will try that and see what happens.
I enjoyed your article and I'm sure some others did too. Thanks for posting it.
Thank you Dean.
I enjoyed the article..
Brought back memories of my childhood. My family wasn't in business but I started young as well. It started when breathlessly I ran in to the house and learned a great lesson...."Mom! I need a pair of Converse All Stars!" Her reply was a sit down and quick lesson, "You WANT a pair of Converse All Stars, you NEED a way to pay for them. Mow a lawn, gather grocery carts (the store would pay kids small change to bring carts as many people walked their carts full of groceries home) Start a business"
I went to the corner store and for two dollars I would break down the store's boxes and haul them to the curb on Thursdays. Took me about an hour or so, the pizza place next door to the corner store hired me to do the same, I had an enterprise!
Then the Dutch Boy paint store a block away sought me out and paid me $4 to do the same....I was rich! but my Thursday was shot....being 13 and still in school kept me from taking on more customers...then DING! The trash doesn't just get picked up everywhere on Thursday. Then I called the city to find out the days and routes...going full time now! But some of the bike rides got long.
Then..."Hey Joe, nice bike! I need a bike like that"......Here comes the first "Thanks Mom"
"No, you WANT a bike like this, you NEED a job. Tell ya what, I'll pay you $4 to get Carpenter's Grocery's trash out on Wednesday and Echol's pharmacy too at $4. I'll pay you on Thursday" By that time I was getting $5 from my little business customers....My first employee! That freed up a long bike ride and still netted me $2 which gave me more time to find more customers and hire more kids....
Of course that didn't last a lifetime, but it sure was enough to sink my teeth in to making deals and being self employed.
To this day I have worked for others and always had some sort of legitimate business going. I retired two years ago from working for others and started heavier concentration on a little dinky import/export thing I was doing for side money that was getting lucrative. If I told you how far it's gotten you'd be calling me a liar but....holy cow!
Thanks Mom!
Hey Joe, what a great story. You're a true capitalist.
Ha, politics....1948 was a great year for me and politics....First off as an 8 years old I met ''Give'em hell'' Harry Truman.
And my cousin Luther ran for for chief of the Red Lake Band of Ojibwe...We have hereditary Chiefs and elected chiefs. We covered all the bases.
Hang on a bit, Kavika. I'm going to do a "First Politics Experience" article.
Buzz, no one gets the kind of responses they would like for their seeds and articles, except maybe Robert Jefferson Davis Shasta or whatever it is.
You do as well as most other people do and I'm sure better than some.
Frankly, this forum is below par in discussing the quantity of the news of the day imo.
Hey John.
I finally attracted the kind of response I was seeking. Read Poppa Joe's comment above. But what about YOU. Did you never have a job or build a business as a kid? Even if it was pennyante, it could be interesting for others to know.