Gum

On the subways lately, there are tons of kids selling candy for a dollar. Last year, the gimmick was that they were selling the candy for a school trip to Rome. This year, most of the kids have given up on that, and are just saying that they are trying to raise money and keep out of trouble.

Now, presuming they get those boxes of candy for a cheap discount, and that they can sell out a box pretty quickly if they hit the trains at rush hour, that's not a bad profit. But that's an awful lot of work all the same.

So I was reminded of my own entrepeneurial days as a kid. When I was 10 or 11 years old, I was in junior high. My parents kept buying these 10 packs of Wrigley's gum, so I pretty much always had a pack on me at school. I started getting sick of people asking me for gum all the time, so jokingly, I started to charge them for it. And the funny thing is, they actually did give me the money. Now admittedly, it literally was for change, because I think I charged maybe 10 cents a pack. A pack had 5 sticks. The 10 packs actually cost my parents $1.29 or maybe $1.39 even. So really, I was pretty wasteful. But I was selling this gum so I could buy different gum - the Red Hots or whatever they were called. Gumballs coated in this viscous red stuff that would stick to your teeth. I didn't even actually like these gumballs, but they were the "cool" gum.

Anyway, I was remembering how I once didn't have any full packs left, and I actually charged someone 2 cents for a stick of gum. I bet my parents would have stopped buying me any candy if they knew I was selling it.

A few years later, I was still finding random packs of gum in the pockets of old clothes and old purses.