A failed small business
Would you buy a rock?
Hello,
Thank you for all the kind messages as I took a break for a few weeks. Here’s a new post. I’ve un-paused y’all subscription. More posts coming regularly. Thanks, Dave
A young entrepreneur hits upon an idea on her school holidays. It occurs to her like lightning, fresh and electric, like all the best ideas of seven-year-olds, and she sets to work immediately.
She siphons herself away from the flow of family activity, and it’s an hour later before her parents discover that their front garden has become a market stall. There is a small table, a chair, and a sign. The sign reads: ‘ROCKS FOR SALE $1’.
And there, by the sign, is a plastic box filled with a few dozen unwashed rocks from the garden.
The first day has no customers, but this doesn’t dampen the entrepreneur’s zeal. Over dinner that night, she explains her business plan to her parents. Poor people, she figures, don’t have a lot of money. So they may be able to afford rocks for $1 and build something they need out of the rocks.
She explains this in cold, simple logic, and her parents nod along, impressed by the young capitalist’s instinctual calling to take money from society’s most vulnerable.
Her parents are potential investors in the business, as they own the title for the land on which the commercial enterprise has launched. Her father points out that the company lacks valuable foot traffic. It is tragically located at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac.
Her mother suggests decorating the rocks with something special so that they are unique and have value. But the CEO shrugs this off. To embellish her stock with designs would take away from the essential, pure genius at the core of her business value: laziness.
Instead, that evening, she put herself to work preparing detailed receipts of stock that have yet to be sold. When she woke up the following day, she said she dreamt about her store. She dreamed of customer hordes begging for her rocks and unexpected twenty-dollar tips from kind buyers.
A week later, the idea hasn’t vanished. But she realises her father’s insight into marketing is worthwhile. He suggests creating flyers for the neighbourhood. She accepts and draws up a dozen flyers, written speedily. Her sister is now in on the game and volunteers as an assistant.
Their father stands atop the driveway and watches them march down the street. The young assistant’s job is to identify mailboxes, which she does with confidence. She points at them and shouts. Then, her older sister deposits a hand-made flyer in the box.
This goes on for an hour or so, and then the entrepreneur goes to her rock shop.
No one comes.
The grief is real. Her parents attempt to shape this into a learning moment. But she is mostly just pissed off that the world has not given her instant success. She does nothing to alter the business and does not move to another.
Instead, months later, she will occasionally ask, ‘Do you remember my rock shop?’ And then she will sigh with resignation, her eyes shifting to the horizon. She speaks of it as a former prospector speaks of a long-forgotten boom.
It is enough of a clear memory for her that her father wonders if she has somehow awoken a latent economic conservatism. Will she, in middle age, confuse her dreams and memories and think that she held a successful business but faced economic ruin through excessive government spending or some such?
The tub of rocks still sits at the top of the driveway. It is a testament to the hardship of small business and lost dreams.