Free joke with every purchase

GARETH SAYS…

Finally we got to do the lemon stand with Amy’s niece Isabel. We spent the morning making some kick ass signage for the table. My favorite signs were as follows…

Support Child Labor
Buy from 5 year olds not multinationals
Made with love and clean hands
Free joke with every purchase

With the signs done we went out and brought the ingredients. I didn’t realise how expensive lemons were – 99c each!!!! However Limes were 6 for a dollar so we decided to do limeade and not lemonade.

We also bought the ingredients to make Lemon Drizzle Cupcakes so sell along with the cool refreshing limeade (you can see I’m still in sell mode). We spent $40 in total. A lot was at stake this stand had better work or Amy and I were going to have to drink a lot of limeade and eat a lot of cake.

We decided to price our drinks and cakes in a novel way. We were betting that Isabel in her special lemonade selling dress that she had chosen to wear would win over everyone who met her so we decided to run a ‘pay what you like scheme’ and to offer a free joke with every purchase.

it worked – we averaged $2 a cup and a cake.

The weather wasn’t on our side though. It pissed it down. But we found we made more money in the rain than in the sunshine as people took great pity on us. One man even gave us $20 for a cup and a cake!!!! We should have asked him if he wanted to adopt Amy and I!

In total we made $54.

When you take away the costs of the ingredients we made a staggering $14 for about 4 hours work! It wasn’t the most profitable scheme in the world but it sure was fun.

We decided to give Isabel the $14 profit for all her hard work. We strongly suggested that she invest it in a high interest account ready for when she goes to college.

I’m sure we will be doing it again sometime soon.

PS For those of you interested here is Isabel’s joke that she came up with especially for the stand. It is not bad for a 5 year old. It’s pretty profound.

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: To save the world

Hmmmm I think we have a junior Al Gore in the making.