Thursday, February 07, 2008

So Crazy It Just Might Work

I can’t decide if I should be proud or appalled.

Lucas (13 and in 8th grade) has come up with a rather sure fire money making plan.

He noticed that his junior high school sells 20 oz. bottles of Coke products out of vending machines for $1.25. This is of course, highway robbery and a travesty of epic proportions.

But our man Lucas sees this as an opportunity to muscle in on the market.

He’s taken to smuggling cans of soda in his backpack to school and storing them in his locker and backpack until lunchtime. At which point he hangs out by the vending machines, selling his wares and undercutting the vending machine price rather significantly.

And he doesn’t just sell normal sodas. He’s branched out into those goofy “energy” drinks that the kids love so much. He sells those for a much higher profit margin.

Seriously, he’s worked it all out on a little piece of graph paper. He knows exactly how much he’ll make on each case he can move. Market analysis and stuff.

I’m all for it, of course.

Except.

He has to sneak all this stuff around and hide it in his locker and treat it like it’s contraband. Because certainly the school would frown upon this sort of activity. I’m also pretty sure that the school gets a cut from Coca-Cola in exchange for exclusivity on campus. So he could get into trouble, which would be sad for our normally well-behaved little guy.

And I’m very much of two minds about pointing out to him that he could get even more inventory to school if he squirreled away cans in his sax case. But his cute blue eye lit up when I told him that, so it’s hard to feel too bad about it.

And I say things to him like, “Don’t drink that Mountain Dew! Dude! You don’t get high on your own supply!”

As a nominally responsible father figure, I’m just not sure how comfortable I feel promoting all this. I’m essentially telling him it’s OK to get around the rules, even if the rules are dumb. And I’m sure that at some point he’ll see my rules (such as they are) are “totally dumb” and feel like he can avoid those as well.

Plus, we’ve bankrolled his initial inventory and he’s being evasive about when he’s paying us back.

“Yeah, I’ll get you that money soon. Real Soon Now. I promise. I just have to move some more product tomorrow.”

If I start seeing phone calls to Bogata, Colombia on our phone bill, that’s when I’ll start to get really worried.

Jon scribbled this mess on 02/07/08 at 11:16 AM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

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