By now, my five years in Newport were about up, and I had met my goal. That little Ben Franklin store was doing $250,000 in sales a year, and turning $30,000 to $40,000 a year in profit. It was the number-one Ben Franklin store—for sales or profit—not only in Arkansas, but in the whole six-state region. It was the largest variety store of any sort in Arkansas, and I don’t believe there was a bigger one in the three or four neighboring states. Every crazy thing we tried hadn’t turned out as well as the ice cream machine, of course, but we hadn’t made any mistakes we couldn’t correct quickly,
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