The entrepreneur
By Dana Grae Kane
For the TODAY
Look out, boy billionaires — she's coming! On a recent sunny morning in Lafayette Park, a very little girl of surely no more than six set up shop adjacent the children's play area as a purveyor of hot coffee and home-made chocolate chip cookies. My friend Barbara and I, tottering about on our canes, took a seat nearby to witness the grand opening. Mom managed her future entrepreneurs in the play area while Dad arranged a table and two miniature chairs, and the businesswoman put up her hand-crayoned sign: Coffee $1.50, Cookies $1.50. This shrewd pricing undercut the local competition (Peet's, $3.50 and up), and yet was sufficient to cover overhead and net a profit. Mom and Dad, partners in Venture Capital, Inc., must have felt they had indeed backed the right start-up and surely envisioned an IPO.
While Dad hoisted the coffee urn onto the table, the CEO unwrapped her tray of big, squishy, utterly scrumptious looking chocolate chip cookies. Stoically perching with well-disguised misery on one of the tiny hardwood chairs, Dad hovered just long enough to make sure all was well, assure his daughter that he was just a few feet away in the play area immediately behind her if needed, and joined the rest of the family.
Admiring such industry, Barbara and I wanted very much to be the first customers, but we had not a penny in our pockets, there never before having been a reason to carry money in the park. I mooched a dollar off Guillermo, one of the wonderful gardeners with whom I work as a volunteer garbage collector, walked up to the boutique and explained I did not have enough money for a full cup of coffee, but would she sell me a half for 75 cents plus a 25-cent tip? Without a word spoken and absolutely stone-faced gravitas, the entrepreneur measured out a half a cup with the precision of a forensic accountant. Not one drop less, not one drop more. This at least gave her her first dollar, which she secured under the sugar container, reminiscent of the old-fashioned kitchen sugar-bowl stash. However, nothing else was even remotely old-fashioned about the operation.
The next customer walked up, rummaged through his pockets, found only lint, and asked her if he could buy a cookie using his smartphone. Without so much as a nanosecond's hesitation, she reached for Dad's phone and completed the transaction at lightning speed. Seeing that she could process payments this way, every parent in the park lined up to shop. She sold the last drop and crumb in about 20 minutes. My, how things have changed since the five-cent lemonade stand . . .
The last classic lemonade operation I experienced was in Lincoln City, in the dark ages of pre-COVID 2018. Two older siblings ran the stand while the youngest boy, no older than the above entrepreneur, advertised the product. He captured prospective customers walking past by riding his bike around us in ever tightening circles so that we had to stop. He would then jump off his bike and shove into our hands a jagged piece of lined foolscap with the price and quality of the product, “5 Cents Good”, penciled in block letters, saying enthusiastically: “Here, have one of our brochures.” He will certainly eventually be recruited from Stanford to be the first Director of Intersteller Advertising for moontomarstourist flights.com.
Dane Grae Kane is a former resident of Lincoln City and occasional guest columnist for the TODAY, now living a life of unparalleled glamor in cosmopolitan San Francisco.