Like many young kids, my brother and I, or friends, would make lemonade and try to sell it out on our driveway. However, bordering one side of our house, we had a frontage road and further out from that, a US Highway passed by. So we would make huge cardboard signs and go stand along the road trying to get people passing by on the frontage road to come by lemonade. Every now and then they'd stop in, and that was always cool. One time we even had a guy come all the way from the highway, said he saw us with our signs, thought we were good businessmen and wanted to support us. That was super-cool.

During the summertime, since our property bordered up right alongside the field, I decided to set up a concession stand, cause those money hungry "adults" were charging too much. I started off selling lemonade and soda I would steal from my parents (shhh... don't tell them), and with the small profits I earned, slowly bought new things to sell from SAMs. Soon I was selling baseball cards, candy, lemonade and all sorts of stuff (sometimes with the help of my little brother).

Although we sold quite a bit on hot days to fans, once we increased our supply of items, I quickly realized that if I sold two cups of lemonade, that meant I could open one pack of baseball cards and such. So I pretty much "ate" up the profits by taking from my supply whenever I could afford it with the money earned on the sale of other items. Still, I always made sure I had enough to re-pay my parents for the supplies they bought.

The baseball league and concession stands quickly became disgruntled at the fact I was selling nice, BIG glasses of lemonade and soda for WAY less than they were and that my supplies and options were increasing. Although I'm sure I was hardly making a dent in their profits, they decided they would come shut down a ten year old, who's just trying to make a buck to feed his family (or baseball card collecting habit).

So one day they told me I could no longer sell stuff alongside the field there. I'm not one for big conflicts, especially with people who even today are probably two times my body mass, so I apologized, closed shop and returned home. When I told my parents about this, my dad was not pleased at all, especially since I had been on private property the entire time. He told me to just go back out there and the next time they had a problem, he'd go talk to them.

So the next week I set up shop again, and when they came and tried to shut me down I went crying to my dad for help (well, I doubt I was actually crying). He went and "had a talk like them", which I envision took place much like the Mafia telling someone how it's gonna be, though I'm sure in real life it was far less exciting. He probably just said something like, it's our private property, leave the kid alone.

I never had another problem, but it turns out that the concession stand was pretty pissed off at my antics apparently. They even went so far as to post signs on their concession stand, and I'm not kidding on this one, that said stuff to the effect of "Local minister Jeff Wright trying to put us out of business" and things like that. My dad didn't let that bother him though, and told me to just keep on selling if I wanted. So I did. And although it didn't make me rich, it was always lots of fun and I enjoyed sitting out there each weekend, trying to make a buck. Seems the only people who were bothered by me selling a very small amount of food each day was the local concession stand, who hated seeing that $20 or of profit each weekend fly out the window.

Serves them right for charging so much.