Thursday, July 14, 2011

Lemonade Stand Lessons...NOT Learned...

It's summertime.  We LOVE summertime around here.  And every summer I make a bucket list of fun things I want to make sure the girls get to experience.  Loved seeing all the little lemonade stands in blogger land and of course immediately put this on my list.  I was even in the process of coming up with my lemonade stand design and thinking how much fun the girls would have helping me make it....until..... I saw this cute cardboard stand come up on Zullily. 
And for a great price......Bam!  Exactly what we needed. I should have realized then that cutting corners wasn't going to give me the homemade lemonade stand experience I thought it was going to be.  I had this vision that the girls would learn a good lesson about hard work and the value of making a dollar.  Here's a rundown of what they really learned.

Lesson # 1.  It takes time and money and some hard work to get started on your business.  Nope.  It really doesn't.  Mom ordered our stand online and she even made our lemonade for us while we danced around and sang, "we get to have a lemonade stand." (Ok, so I went with Strawberry ice tea instead for all you detailed oriented people saying, why is her lemonade so dark)

  Lesson # 2.  It takes a little time to build up a customer base.  We live in a neighborhood that doesn't get much traffic so don't expect to get a ton of customers and not everyone will stop so let's not get our panties in a wad if they don't stop.  Wrong.  You should have seen the masses of people that came out of their houses.  Not to mention, every single person that drove by stopped as well.  This also helped them learn that mom isn't always right.  Geez. 

 Lesson # 3.  It takes thought into how much to charge for your product.  No one will pay $25 for a glass of lemonade (As Brynley suggested)  Nope.  Wrong.  Apparently sweet strangers will gladly give these two Rascals $10 and even $20 for small glasses of not very good Strawberry Iced Tea.  EVEN after I informed them it's not a fundraiser, it's just for fun. 

They made $40 in less than 30 minutes.

Go figure....so the lessons I thought they were going to learn didn't actually pan out the way I thought they would.  No biggy, the girls did thoroughly enjoy it and we even got to meet some very nice neighbors that we had not met yet.  It's still summer fun and that's what's really important.
ps. I just might quit my day job and team up with these two to sale lemonade for a living. :)

A&J

2 comments:

  1. My two youngest threw together a lemonade stand this week too. They got one teenage buyer who gave them $20 for a 25cent cup of lemonade! They collected about $23 in an hour (more than I make at my stay at home mom gig!), but are donating it all to world vision. :) I love your stand and the lessons...they made me laugh!

    Rachel
    http://www.holy-craft.blogspot.com

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