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And you thought the green-beret'd Girl Scouts and their cookies were enterprising little kids?
In Victorville, CA, the latest trend at schools is an underground sugar trade. With candy and other "bad" snacks banned from school campuses, kids are selling contraband Snickers and Twinkies right out of their backpacks.
According to Jim Nason, principal at Hook Junior High School in Victorville, it's become quite a lucrative business for the dealers. Kids bring things like candy bars, soda, and even energy drinks from home in their "sack lunch" and turn around and sell them for a healthy profit, with some kids walking around school with upwards of $40 in cash.
While I understand this is a bit of a problem for the schools and parents, I have to hand it to the kids -- at least we can count on them to be very good businesspeople when they grow up.
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3-25-2008 @6:55PM Sleighboy said... I love it.. kids living in their own free-market society. Profits must be really great considering their parent(s) shelled out for the goods in the first place. Of course, might as well consider that "seed money" since at some point you'd want to keep more supply on-hand than you could reasonably remove from your house. It's the underground FBLA! :)
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3-25-2008 @7:19PM Chase said... my god, the audacity of this poster to publish a story about kids selling kids like drugs and only put little colored boys in the photograph.. Stereotyping much?
Only kidding of course.. Kids will ALWAYS find stuff to sell to one another for a profit. It was me and my best friends favorite thing to do.. come up w/ ways to make money at school.
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3-25-2008 @7:53PM sarah said... sleighboy - and if you think about it for the kids, they make 100% profit since they don't spend a dime to buy whatever junk that their parents are getting in bluk from costco
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3-25-2008 @10:04PM Jami said... For several months in Junior High, until we were caught, I made gobs of money selling those weird hard candies with bubble gum in the middle that came in a rectangular package. Can't remember the name but my accomplice's Mom bought them wholesale for us for about a nickel a pack and we sold them for 25 cents. It was a sweet deal for everyone and it was my first real job. I probably made more money, adjusted for inflation, then than I do now, 30 some years later. I'll never forget the rush of counting that money....
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3-25-2008 @10:05PM sarah said... jami, that is a 400% (or is it 500%) profit!!!!
can i just say "wow."
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3-26-2008 @9:26AM Cometgirl63 said... yeah, this is not a new phenomenon. My brother did it in school and there was a kid in my grade that sold candy too. My brother stocked his own supplies- our parents never bought anything like the stuff he sold. He had to do it all on his own. He sold jolly ranchers, brownies, little debbie snacks, and gum. If I recall correctly, his entrepreneurial spirit helped him purchase his first car. And he has owned his own shop since he got out of high school.
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3-26-2008 @10:17AM Rob O. said... Of course, the kids couldn't do this if their parents didn't give 'em the junk or money to buy it. Seems like this is a case of the community not buying into the policies put into place in the schools.
Then again, so many parents see nothing wrong at all with breakfast being a Pop-Tart and a "juice" box that's consumed on the way to daycare or school. So, they load little Johnny up on rocket fuel (a.k.a. sugar & nutritionally-void carbs) and then get ticked off when he gets in trouble for being overactive and inattentive in school. Pretty easy math to me: Garbage in, garbage out.
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3-26-2008 @1:42PM Michael Schmitt said... I'm just wondering when the schools or the community or the state will make a policy or a law that will actually BAN sugary foods from the schools and will punish those who carry or sell sugary foods as if they are controlled substances...
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3-26-2008 @7:15PM Adriane said... Rob O.-- I see your point, but you have to remember that kids just like candy, regardless of how well they eat at home. I had a nutrious meal with my family every night not to mention brown bag lunches and a healthy breakfast every day and I was still stoked when I could trot from elementary school to the local shop in town and buy some penny candy.
Not to mention, many many kids get pocket change or an allowance-- what are you supposed to do, give a child a few dollars and then a list of what s/he can and cannot buy? Yeesh.
While hawking candy for profit is a bit different, it's not a far deviance from trading snacks at the lunch table- which pretty much every person I know did when they were young kids.
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3-26-2008 @7:28PM AJ said... And this is how drug dealers started.
Basically if they crack down, a badder element starts selling, the good kids get driven off. Then the real crime starts! yay...
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3-27-2008 @5:49PM greg hudson said... when i was in middle school i was really into selling burnt CD's and DVD's i was always really into techie stuff so 5 or 6 years ago i would rent movies and buy cds and copy them and sell them
i had a pretty good racket going even teacher were buying my stuff
in high school i had some friends who sold pop because the pop machines got taken away i am a senior now and nothing like that happens anymore
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3-28-2008 @4:26PM smikwily said... One of the characters in the 4th season of The Wire was a Middle School kid (possibly High School, can't remember for sure) who did the same thing. He was even taking orders for certain things as well.
Could see it being a pretty good money maker, especially since they are pulling junk food out of the school vending machines, etc.
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3-28-2008 @10:52PM tangela said... I'm surprised that this is considered newsworthy. In my high school [Stuyvesant in NYC], kids sell snacks all the time to raise money for clubs and such. In middle school I used to resell plastic gonggi stones [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonggi] I bought in Chinatown. They were, for some reason, extremely popular, and I made a hefty profit. It was neat.
:]
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