Barters & Bootstraps: PICK A SPOT & MAKE A STAND

(Page 4 of 5)

April/May 1992
By Ted Garrison 
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Place your scale under a light where customers can read it, but keep money in a place where it cannot be reached. Use old-fashioned, honest selling, of which not enough is being done today. Incidentally, you do not necessarily have to give your products away in a roadside stand. People who stop are looking for bargains, but so are the folks uptown. A guide to the prices they're paying in town can be found in the edition of the local paper that carries the ads for local supermarkets. In my area it comes out on Thursday, with glowing, full-page ads. Also find out what the people in the towns around you like best. A German or Italian restaurant has certain demands for ingredients you might be able to grow and sell in large quantities. These customers might seek you out if your products are better than those sold in the local stores.

You will need paper bags to package the items you sell. These can be bought in bundles of 500 from local wholesale houses and come in different sizes. The handiest bag sizes are sizes 6-8, 12-20, and 25 (sizes are measured in pounds). The very small bags tend to waste the world's dwindling supply of paper and are of little use unless you want to package one cucumber or one bell pepper, which can usually go in on top of something else. Mesh bags are fine for displaying fruit. The fruit is precounted, and the customers can see the items they buy through the mesh.

If you want to run your stand on a community-type basis, with several groups pitching in, a percentage of the sales should go to upkeep and taxes. There is an advantage to this in that it could eliminate a series of small stands placed all up and down the highway and allow the land needed for the stand on individual homesteads to be used for something else. One large stand could accommodate several groups. Common problems such as pricing, percentages, etc., would have to be worked out among your group, either around a big table or in New England town-meeting fashion.

There are an infinite number of ways to make a stand pay. The fruit-and-vegetable stand is one of the last bastions of real free enterprise, one of the last true family businesses left that has not been swallowed up into a conglomerate. The barber shop and shoe-repair shop remain small vestiges of the old system, but even they have bowed to the high-rent status of the shopping center.

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