Last week this space noted the pledge of Country Time Lemonade to help children's lemonade stands that run afoul of zealous brain-dead bureaucrats and law enforcement officials. Country Time will pay up to $300 to offset fines that the illegal beverage tycoons may incur, which is an excellent way to offer one of the most useful responses one might make to such a bureaucrat: Bite me.
Compassion International has demonstrated another good way to stymie the killjoys. A trio of brothers set up a lemonade stand over Memorial Day in Denver, CO, as a way of raising money to donate to the charity. They operated near the Denver Arts Festival, selling cups of lemonade for about a seventh of the cost of the official Arts Festival vendors. Someone called the police and they had to shut the boys down because they did not have the needed permits. No one knows exactly who squealed, but my suggestion is for police to see who at the Festival looked the most like someone who'd been sucking on lemonade's base ingredient -- because anyone who would call the cops on a kids lemonade stand which is raising money for charity has earned the label sourpuss.
Anyway, the stand got shut down and the boys' mom started a Kickstarter campaign to raise some money to be sent to one of CI's sponsored children. Then the company itself heard of the matter and invited the boys to set up a stand in their parking lot. Which, the Denver Chamber of Commerce would like you to ignore, is in Colorado Springs.
Between their sales in the parking lot and the Kickstarter fundraiser, the boys collected more than $8,000 for the charity and their sponsored child. The city of Denver collected a lousy PR incident. And, one hopes, whomever ratted out the brothers has collected a painful boil or two, which was mistakenly doused with lemon juice.
My thought about things like the Arts Festival is this: if your vendors are overcharging to the point where people will (presumably) go to the inconvenience to go to an outside vendor, maybe you need to re-examine your pricing structure.
ReplyDeleteThen again: I've been to a few conferences where I showed up a day early, ate in a couple of the restaurants near the venue, and returned DURING the conference to find a "special conference menu" of fewer choices and every entree with a price $3 or more higher than what it was. (I suppose the assumption was that we were all rich folks with expense accounts - which was SO not true - and also that we'd not be returning ever again, so we were worth gouging, but I admit it gave me a really bad feeling about those restaurants, and I tried to find other places to go. And yes, they actually SAID "special conference menu" on their chalkboards, so you knew)
Don't doubt it. In this case, the kind of person who would call the cops on a kid's lemonade stand is very likely the kind of person who would charge $7 for lemonade.
ReplyDelete