Driving home through North Park recently, I crested a small hill and on the right side of the road was the first true sign of summer — a lemonade stand.
I’ve always been an unabashed sucker for these street-side operations run by young entrepreneurs-in-the-making, so I pulled to the side and walked back to the stand. Five kids were manning two card tables shoved together containing several dozen cups of lemonade.
I could tell I was their first customer of the day. I exchanged waves with the security-conscious mom and dad sitting on their front porch a few hundred feet away.
“How much, kids?” I asked.
“Twenty-five cents, sir,” the oldest girl said, thrusting a half-filled, Dixie cup-size beverage at me. “We just made it, from real lemons, too.”
“Well, all I have is two dollars, so I’ll take four cups and you can keep the other dollar for a tip,” I said, making a big production out of getting the money from my wallet.
As I was leaving I could hear two of them running up the hill, yelling, “Mom — Mom! We just made a sale! Got a tip, too!”
Yeah, kid, I remember that feeling.
In 1966, my family was living in Dallastown, outside York, Pa. My brother Dale and I had reached the age (10 and 8, respectively) where we needed money to fund our burgeoning baseball habit — gloves, hats, baseball cards — but opportunities seemed grimly limited.
Allowances were still a few years away. We were too scrawny to cut grass, way too young to deliver newspapers or lifeguard at the local pool.
Somehow, we got the idea to sell magazines. They were everywhere in the 1960s — Look, Life, Mad, Sports Illustrated, National Geographic and Saturday Evening Post among them. We read Boys’ Life cover to cover, along with some outdoor magazines my family subscribed to. Dozens of coffee-stained, dog-eared copies of Field & Stream, Outdoor Life and Sports Afield lay available around our house.
Hmmm.
The next day, we set up shop at the far corner of our yard, using a picnic table bench as our magazine stand. Since we lived in a good-sized housing plan, we figured the neighbors would at least be curious and stop by. Turned out they weren’t as curious as we thought.
Expectations ran high in the morning, then waned as the heat of the day intensified. We waited, then waited some more while dropping prices from 25 cents to 10, and, by 2 o'clock, to a nickel. Finally, as we were about to call it quits, a blue sedan stopped.
“Whaddya selling?” asked the towering, suit-clad businessman who got out.
“Fishing magazines,” we said.
“Magazines,” he fairly spat, quickly thumbing through a few of them. “Why would you sell used magazines?”
The following five seconds of silence were deafening. He paused, then uttered what could be the most succinct, beneficial suggestion I have ever received. It was customer feedback par excellence.
“You boys ought to try selling something people might actually want to buy,” he said over his shoulder as he walked away.
My brother and I didn’t make a sale that day, but by God, we got someone to stop and learned something from him.
In 1967, we moved to Pittsburgh. While our house was being built in Ingomar, we rented a huge old farmhouse off Evergreen Road in Ross adjacent to a substantial housing plan.
We thought of what we could sell to kids closer to our age and found Incredible Edibles to be the ticket. They were made from a thick, plastic, waxy, barely FDA-approved liquid poured into die-cast metal molds in the shape of bugs and insects, which underwent a few minutes of tepid warming in the aptly named Sooper Gooper Oven Heater.
We made two trips a day through the neighborhood hawking Incredible Edibles from our wagon. We actually did pretty well selling them for a year or two until one of the other neighborhood kids got his own equipment and undercut our prices, a rude introduction to the world of free enterprise.
The passage of nearly five decades has dulled the memory of our first Incredible Edible sale, but the heart-pounding experience of the guy who stopped to look at our raggedy magazines in 1966 remains vivid. When you run a roadside stand, hope never springs more eternal than with the next passing car.
Dave Marko of Marshall, owner of a promotional product company, can be reached at dave@marko-promo.com.
First Published: July 24, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
