"The Suicide Lemonade Stand"

There is nothing better than a big, cold, glass of lemonade in the heat of the summer. I was riding down the road the other day and saw some kids had a lemonade stand. They were selling a cool beverage to thirsty customers in this immense heat so I stopped and bought a glass from them. It used to be something you saw everyday during the summer. I think most kids these days would rather stay inside than work for a dollar. Then close to the same day I had a couple of articles come across my e-mail where cops were shutting down kids lemonade stands because they didn't have the proper permit to be selling lemonade in that town or county. I couldn't believe that any officer or law official would want to kill the entrepreneurial spirit of any American as long as they weren't harassing or hurting anybody and they were on their own property. Isn't it better for them to be doing this earning spending money and not sitting in the A/C playing video games, but the Govt. may be missing out on some tax money. I guess the govt. is getting them ready for adulthood early teaching them about taxes, permits, and bureaucracy or wanting to teach them this business minded spirit is not where the country is headed. The last I checked the country was built on the backs of business owners and entrepreneurs. Or could it be the one lame neighbor made a call to the police or sheriff's department because the stand was harassing to them. We have become a country that gives so much to the minority voice and I am not talking color here. What happened to the majority voice?

If they found that harassing, they would have insisted the lemonade stand I ran when I was younger be shut down and me and my cousins and our Mom's be put in jail. Russ, Kimberly (my cousins and next door neighbors growing up) and I would always have a lemonade stand in the heat of the summer in July and August after farm work had shut down for the summer. It was similar to the picture above, but we charged .50 for a glass of our special brew. The biggest difference in our stand and a normal lemonade stand was the name. We called ours "The Suicide Lemonade Stand". Why, you ask? We realized that getting people to stop and shop with us was a difficult task as we lived on a country road that "people flew", as my Mom would say. They drove speeds up to 60-70 miles an hour which was way to fast on a road where lots of kids were playing. So after a few days of watching people speed by and only having a few of the slow driving senior citizens in the community stop by, we made a decision to move our marketing in another direction to get people to stop.

So the next day after a night's planning, we put our marketing plan into action. We got everything set up for business the next morning. Let me explain what we did. Have you ever seen kids hosting a car wash, holding up poster boards on the side of the road to get you to come in? They may be holding the posters in their hands or the poster may be attached to what looks like to me a tomato stake. We had a similar idea and we made a poster and attached ours to a tomato stake out of the garden which was the first wrong in our plan. Country Rule #1-You don't meddle with a country person's garden or neighbors garden even if they are kin to you. Mistake #1.

Mistake #2 was how we attracted the new customers. Remember I told you about the nice church groups standing on the side of the road holding their posters up to attract customers. Well we took ours to a whole new level. We  knew that just holding up a poster on the side of the road wouldn't do it because it was similar to what we were already doing. So how would we make the speeding speedsters stop? My plan was to lay in the road flat and hold up the sign we had made with the tomato stake and poster board in the air. I came to the agreement on the plan with my two partners, but my percentage of profits would go from 33% to 50% since I was endangering my life and taking a huge risk to make us money. My partners quickly agreed, I don't know if it was because they were scared to sacrifice their bodies for a buck or they knew the profits would go up that much by having me do it. So here we go, with our first car. It was none other than the speedster herself and we will call her Gina. Gina had a problem with speeding down our road for years. If she did see our stand before, it was was nothing but mere blur out her window. They told me who it was coming, and let me say I almost urinated on myself. Wouldn't you know the first one would have to be her. I don't know how she got her car to stop that fast, but she had to break every braking record for cars in the books. She jumped out of her car and Gina wasn't much of church person, so the only words she used were words you would hear on late night HBO back in the day. We calmed her down some and Russ the salesman moved into action. One sell, Ka-ching! The rest of the first day went on with many sales, many lectures, and many close calls with my body coming close to a lot of grills of automobiles. We finished the day with thirty dollars in profits compared to just six the day before. So the plan was a good one for money, but not so good for my body. Our parents were very impressed with how well we were doing by increasing our profits by 500%. They wanted to know our secret to our lemonade upswing . The only problem with that was, we weren't telling. The next day we got set up in the same place and set the marketing plan in motion again. The sound of a oncoming car was sounding off in the distance around the curve, so I assumed the position in the road. Only it wasn't a car. It was my Uncle Choyce in his propane truck.  Choyce was a quiet man, a deacon at the Baptist church, and overall a great guy. If Uncle Choyce had a flaw, it was his vision. His vision wasn't anywhere near average. So I knew when my partners said it was him coming down the road, I was taking a huge risk not only because of his vision but also because of the big propane truck he was driving. If he didn't see me, Splat! I felt the big truck rumbling down the road and shaking the pavement. Then when he got within 200 feet I heard his six wheels lock up and throw black smoke in the air while the big truck came to a screeching halt. Shew! I thought. He was seeing pretty well that day, thank goodness. He jumped down out of the truck with both feet hitting like a thud that I could feel as I lay there. He walked straight over to me grabbed me by the ear and yanked me off the pavement. Now I can't be certain, because I had only one functional ear at the time because his hand had my other scrunched together in his hand while he was dragging me, but I swear I heard a lot of the same words that Gina was using the day before. The words he was using is nothing new for an everyday Episcopalian, but for a Baptist deacon, to me, I couldn't believe he was saying these words. He drug me by my ear eight hundred feet to my house cursing or calling me a idiot the entire way and told my mom what I was doing. I got a spanking that day and I deserved it. Even now when I walk down the road and a car is coming I will move in the ditch to get out of the way. My ear still has trouble to this day from being tugged on so hard. Uncle Choyce then made his way to Russ and Kimberly's house and let Aunt Jan know what we had been doing. They didn't get into any trouble for the suicide marketing, but they did when Aunt Jan saw the sign we made with her tomato stake and her then broken tomato plant that was once held up by our sign holder.

"The Suicide Lemonade Stand" now only lives in my memory and I get a good laugh about it every time I see a stand on the side of the road. The marketing that was done that day is what marketers now would call extreme marketing, but I just call it being a business man making a sale in a extreme market.