Entrepeneuring my Neighborhood
I never cease to marvel at the number of people in Jamaica that are selling trinkets, water, fruit, and just about anything else you can imagine on the roadside. People in Jamaica are forced to be enterprising. The government is not there with a safety net to catch the poor people. So if you aren’t motivated, you starve. Paul Ryan’s and Mitt Romney’s wet dream.
I admire the people who are resourceful. My father instilled that principle in me, which brings me to the current story, setting up my two boys to sell water and munchies to a hungry, thirsty, smoked-out, 4-20 crowd on April 20, National Marijuana Day.
Of course we waited till the last minute to set this caper up. Marley and my wife went downtown and bought water, and candy and chips. Meanwhile I cleaned up the house and set up my sound system, (very loud) to broadcast music outside to the street.
The day started slowly enough. The streets were deserted. But slowly foot-traffic picked up. Soon, we noticed the buses were filled to capacity, and people began to walk up Haight Street in clotted groups of twenty or thirty.
They were thirsty. They bought bottles of water at a dollar. But no one was buying the chips, M&M’s candy bars or chips. We bagan to worry that we had made a mistake. We dropped the price from a dollar to seventy-five cents. No bids, no offers, no interest, just people buying water.
Four Twenty in the afternoon and the moment passed without incident. There was a pause in the traffic. People seemed to stop where they were to mark the moment. You could smell the ganja in the air.
Then a massive wave of people started moving in the other direction; toward downtown.
Water continued to sell, but then someone walked up, and bought seven bags of M&M’s.
The candy started selling faster than iphones when they were first introduced to a world starved for intelligent phones.
Soon, we were closing shop. Open between 11:00 AM and 5:30 PM and we were simply sold out.
Nothing my sons loved more than counting the money. My youngest mentioned that he thought it was magical how we just made all this money.
Magical indeed.
