Today’s post comes from perennial sophomore Bubby Spamden.
Hey Mr. C.,
I’ve really been loving the power outage we’ve had since last Saturday. I know my plan for summer was pretty much to sit in the basement at our house and play video games with my buddy Oscar other losers who also don’t have jobs. But all that gets thrown out the window when the power dies and your devices don’t work.
Then I realized this was a business opportunity!
So I grabbed my dad’s gasoline powered generator and went down to the nearby strip mall and found a table outside the Starbucks and put up a sign that said “charge your phone for $5”!
You wouldn’t believe how popular that was!
I ran the generator all day and using a power strip from the garage I was able to charge six cell phones at a time. It took about 2 hours to charge each phone, and I worked a 10 hour day, so do the math!
No, I mean literally, do the math, because I have no idea how to figure this out.
All I know is that running the generator all day long took ten gallons of gas at 3.54 per gallon and I think I wound up with more money than I had when I started. But it also cost me something in explaining time, since I had to argue with people pretty much nonstop about the noise and the fumes.
I think what with our infrastructure breaking down and all these mega-storms popping up, this could be my career – cell phone charger mogul. I hear they do it all the time in those “third world” countries, and my Uncle Dan says that’s what we’re turning into.
He’s kind of sour most of the time.
He also says that the word to remember for a young person looking to find a career used to be “plastics”, but today it’s “batteries.”
So anyway, I think this is going to be my great strategy – to charge batteries in places where the power has gone out.
Or I could just try to meet this girl I saw on CNN and convince her to marry me. Then I’d be set for life because she’s going to be rich. I’m pretty sure she’d like me a lot, though it would take some effort on her part because people say I’m not easy to know or understand.
But that’s OK – she seems like the type who isn’t afraid of a little work!
See you on Easy Street!
Your Pal,
Bubby
Describe a Get Rich Quick idea of yours that didn’t pan out.
Trail Baboon 
About six years ago, two professional dance studio owners approached me asking if I’d perform with them in a national dance contest. They proposed choreographing a three person dance to the tune “It’s Raining Men”. I went to Best Buy in Minnetonka to buy the CD. The very large Jamaican sales associate said that we should listen to it to make sure that it was the correct version of the song. As we stood there, he starting swaying a bit and snapping his fingers in time to the music. I followed suit and before long the two of us busted out with all our dance moves. Right there in the middle of Best Buy in the middle of the day. A crowd suddenly formed around us and a department manager grabbed a video cam to tape the event.
A week later, I returned to the store to buy something and several different employees rushed up to me saying, “You’re the dancing queen!! Our general manager wants to meet you!” The manager excitedly informed me that the tape had already been shown at a regional conference as an example of how much fun Best Buy shopping could be. He went on to say that they wanted to kick off a national campaign to upgrade the company’s dull image. He even said, “You could be to Best Buy what Jared is to Subway!” Needless to say, I instantly envisioned a whole new career involving flying all over the country performing “impromptu” dances in some of the 700 stores.
My get-rich-quick fantasy came to a rather unfortunate, abrupt halt however. I made the mistake of telling this fun story to a local who owned a home town newspaper. He asked if he could run the story and I said he could when it was the right time. He ran in three days later and the CEO of the corporation read it over his morning coffee. It would seem that a business this vast has its own marketing and ad program through which any and all creative strategies are generated. Since the local branch hatched the whole idea, protocol had been violated and the dream vanished just as quickly as it had appeared.
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CB, I once thought I might convert my interest in gardening into a big money maker some what like you thought you might make some big bucks from your dancing. The Dummies books were big sellers at the time I came up with this idea. I thought a Dummies book on gardening that I could write would be a big seller. I really didn’t know much about writing and publishing books so there really wasn’t much chance my plan would work. Also, within a short period of time, after I thought of this, a Gardening for Dummies book was published and not by me.
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i think your gardening book would have an appeal not found in the mass market offerings by publishing houses jim
i encourage you to laying out a plan for your book and looking at publishing it either through a publishing house or self publishing for the people who would enjoy it.
i just saw a seed savers dinner on groupon they must hold in iowa or something and it looked to be pretty well received. i would think if that crowd got wind of a book about their passion it might take off. amazon offfers self publishing for like a dollar a book
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Just back from vacation and trying to catch up with last week’s posts. I was glad to hear what the second neurologist said. Isn’t it amazing how vastly different one neurologist’s reading of an EEG can be from another’s?
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i loved that response too. it never occured to the first guy that may just be the way cb rolls. i hope it turns out to be the case.
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Good morning. There was a time when I thought I could make a good return on my money investing in the stock market. I wouldn’t get rich super fast, but I would make a good return and then reinvest it to end up, over time, with a fairly large chunk of money. I was even told that this was a good thing to do was my modest amount of savings by people who I thought were giving good advice. Some of the money that I invested at the peak of the rise in the stock market many years ago has still hardy earned any money. The secret motto of the people who run Wall Street is the same as that of B. T. Barnum, “there’s a sucker born every minute”.
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Alas, Jim, I had the same experience. It’s a long story, and not a funny one. I invested a good deal of inherited wealth in a stock portfolio that I was assured would support me for the rest of my life. Instead, the market went in the tank and I learned my timing was horrible. And before long I figured out that my relationship to my financial adviser was that of a sheep to a shepherd. He acted like my friend, but my function was actually to get sheared from time to time. And before long, I was left with a negative balance while he sat high in his office with the marble hallway and a huge reflecting pool.
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my wife had a grandmother who had died and left her and her brother a bunch of money. she sat on it for six months trying to figure out what to do and i finally convinced her to meet with my financial guy who said he wouold plug it into the stock market mutual funds programs he had so successfully done for me over the years. she put her money in and 2 day…. 2 days later 9 11 hit and the stock market was cut in half. she freaked out and went balistic. what can i do what can i do was her mantra. i checked it out and the agreement we signed said it would take 3 days or something like that to get the money out and by that time the market had truely tanked. she had put half her money in and that half had lost 50% of its value. what can i do was her only question. i told her to put the other half in. she wouldnt do it but that was the best advice i ever gave. buying stock 3 days after 911 would have given you 1000 percent increase on you money within 3 years.
but lets see now 10 hours a day at 1 gallon of gas per hour, 6 plugs at 5$ a phone for a 2 hour charge. 110 dollars profit if gas is 4 dollars per gallon and you really do get 6 phones done for 5 2hour shifts each.
bubby… power strips sell at menards for 2 dollars and if you plug a 6 plug strip into each of your 6 plugs you now have 36 plug instead and increase the revenue picture dramatically. plug 6 into each of those and for an 80 dollar investment you now have 216 plugs. now the challange is to keep track of your 200 customers and the revenue goes form 110 dollars to a tad over 5000. all for an 80 dollars investment in power strips. cmon bubby, rock and roll on that battery mogel business baby
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Rise and Shine Baboons!
Well, Bubby–good for you. Finally a spark of motivation to do something.
I don’t know that I have ever expected to be rich or thought in terms of a get rich quick scheme. My grandfather did that expecting to make it big with pork belly futures. Rumor has it that he lost money on that. His compulsive behavior cured me of get rich quick. It rarely happen.
I do keep expecting to win the lottery, but I never remember to buy a ticket…. Somehow that plan is flawed.
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Returned home yesterday from Prince Edward island and Nova Scotia. People there are somewhat like Bubby, in that school lasts until the end of this week, so there are only two months to make a dime from travellers.
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Was it good, Renee? It sounds a bit like you felt like a target.
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Not at all like a target. It was a great trip.
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My dad was always planning to make big money–he tried door-to-door selling, investing (Mom picked a medical supply company that paid a $50 dividend for decades; Dad bought into a furniture company that shortly went bankrupt), and in later years got involved in one pyramid scheme after another after another. The one that still makes me incandescent convinced him that the Bible predicted oil would be discovered in Israel and took him for $10,000. In the end he lost all their savings and the house; the predatory mortgage lenders got at him. Goddess knows what would have been next, if he hadn’t had his strokes. Loan sharks, maybe? He was utterly impervious to sense, especially out of the mouths of females, who couldn’t possibly know anything about money despite his wife managing the household so well she paid the mortgage off early. Thanks to his bad example I’m allergic to money schemes, though I wish I had much more of Mom’s native good sense and penny-pinching skills!
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I should say that Mom kept Dad’s nonsense in check for years, and he only went off the rails, remortgaging the house and spending every cent of her carefully-built savings, after she died. She entrusted me with the checkbook when she went into the hospital, but he demanded I give it to him, and I couldn’t really refuse even though I knew what would happen. And I was right, one of the few times I wished I wasn’t.
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I do not even want to try to imagine how painful that must have been. I’m a confirmed squeezer of the nickel myself, and it is hard enough to see all that work and scrimping go for a necessary expense of some sort, but for it all to go for nothing….
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My parents lost some money in an investment scheme. As a result my mother would not let my Dad invest in any thing that was not extremely safe. Most of their money went into municipal bonds which turned out to be pretty good investments.
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I’ve never trusted financial advisers or the stock market. 18 years ago, I invested my small 10K retirement fund with a well-known brokerage house after they promised up to a 25% interest return. They took my paltry little nest egg and repeatedly did transactions with it. By the end of ten years, my money had made zero interest and the brokerage house had made about three thousand, all of which came from their transaction charges! Unfortunately, there is no safe place for money anymore. No bank interest on savings (although banks make a ton charging interest on borrowed money!), no CD interest, and barely pennies on the dollar for mutual funds.
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OT – At the Carolina Chocolate Drops concert on Saturday night at the Minn. Zoo, a KFAI dignitary was hosting the intermission and asked if anyone remembered Dale Connelly — and the crowd went wild. There was quite a buzz when the previously uninformed found out they could again hear the dulcet tones of Dale’s voice on the radio.
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a little too much time on your hands sherrilee?
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just working on a project in which I push the button, wait a bit, push the button, wait a bit, push the button, wait a bit……
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can we take out ads for the trail baboon on kfai in the morning and start charging admission to get on the trail. i think we could make big money
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Sound like a get rich quick scheme, tim. Will it pan out?
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tim, this is one of the few habits I can afford! My penny-pinching self would have to give it up if it started costing me.
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Excellent!
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my life has been spent with get rich quick schemes that all had a blip of greatness and a similar result in the regard that if there is a way to screw it up it will show itself. i like edison have learned thousands of ways not to do a business plan. i ma still waiting for the electric light to surface, then there is just that little detail about putting wires to every house in the world and putting up power lines on poles every 50 feet across the natiion/ world / universe. vision requires adaptive thinking and thank goodness spelling is secondary..
i have three i am working on as we speak but they are hush hush… wouldn’t want them to fall into the wrong hands.
past stories… i had a snowblower company i sold to menards fellt farm and all the hardware chains. gambles coast to coast our own hardware hank warner etc… i made the snowblower company sucessful along with a team of canadians and had a blast doing it and we were so successful we came to the us and bought a us based company that was biger than we were. the parent company thought it made sense to leave the american sales team in place seeing as they knew the us market but what they forgot was that the canadian sales team got them there and was the reason the american company was available for purchase. i was left in place with a team of american management who was resentful of my being forced upon them and they made life miserable before they fired me. while all this was going on i found a company that made snowblower cabs and added them to my list of companies i sold stuff for. when the cab company heard i had been fired by the snowblower company they called my customers and told them i was being replaced. one of my customers was good enough to call me and inform me of the plan early on and i went into the snowblower cab business and started making them with my name on them. it turned out to be a big deal. the stuff i was selling for someone else for 50 bucks i was able to have made for me for 7 and i got to keep the change. that turned into a plan for about 20 years and i have traveled around the world asking people to make stuff i can put my name on and sell. it all turns out to be a problem eventially but if you keep at it you find a different way to fail next time and hopefully you have enough good things going on while that one is failing to make up the difference. a mile wide and an inch deep is not for everyone but for me its become very familiar. i have a couple thousand ice poppers in my warehouse that a group of inventors who reminded me a bit of that group of encyclopedia researchers in the old danny kaye/virginia mayo remake of the gary cooper barbara stanwick movie song is born/ ball of fire. i need to get rid of them but i am always too busy on the next project to get that one wrapped up. watch out what you wish for. some people look for opportunity. i look for an opportunity to focus on all the opportunity i have bombarding me all the time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4cLUrJznJs
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Now that looks like a fun movie. Too bad it’s not available on Netflix.
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I worked for a guy for who always had pie in the sky ideas that he was sure would make big bucks that he never managed to get to work. However, he had absolutely no management skills and also tended to take advantage of other people to bail himself out when his deals went bad. He did have plenty of energy that he used to work his way out of bad situations. tim, I think your mile wide and an inch deep approach is a little like the pie in the sky guy I knew. You are not like him because I don’t think you would take advantage of anyone to get out of a deal that didn’t work. I hope you find something or several things that come throughout for you in a big way.
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Bubby, think wind and solar. Sure, people complain about the weather all the time, but unlike the smelly gas generator, they will know there is not a thing you can do about it.
Great link, Dale. I am going to have to share that one with the s&h. I’m wondering if we could charge the phones and laptops using those solar panels they sell at Menards. Those things just intrigue me. I confess, my forte is not in making money, but boy do I love to find ways to not have to spend it enriching corporations who seem to already have great plenty cash to be getting on with.
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You can get a solar gadget charger at Radio Shack. It has adapters for different kinds of cell phones and laptops. I bought one as a gift once – I think it cost about forty or fifty bucks.
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I don’t think I’ve ever tried a ‘get rich quick’ scheme… and I don’t buy lottery tickets so that won’t work.
I’m reminded of the old joke (and pardon me if I’ve told it before which I probably have):
A farmer wins $2 Million in the lottery. They ask him what he’s going to do with his winnings. He says ‘I’m going to keep farming until it’s gone!’
And speaking of old movie clips, there’s this old movie called ‘Forever And a Day’. Made by the English during WWII and featuring an all star cast and well known writers. I saw it once years ago, haven’t seen it since and can’t find a copy. But here’s a snippet. It’s supposed to start 2:20 into the youtube clip so we’ll see if I did that right.
http://youtu.be/HIK-faKvjTc?t=2m20s
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OK, the picture is at the 2:20 mark but it starts at the beginning. It’s still fun and seeing a skinny Charles Laughton is fun.
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Like Jacque, I am always hoping I will be a winner and get a big pay off from some place. Also, I don’t know where this pay off will come from because I never up my name in for anything.
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Well, my idea wasn’t necessarily to Get Rich Quick, but hopefully to get more income than I was getting currently. Since I like reading and I like books and I like “matching” people with books (particularly kids’ books), I thought selling books on the internet would be a good thing for me to do. Ha. What I failed to take into account was the fact that not only am I not good at things like figuring out sales tax if I sold something to someone in MN and keeping track of expenses and payments, but those things terrify me. Also, when you sell things on the internet using something like abebooks, you get no “thrill” from seeing the excitement of someone getting a book from you that they especially want. “It’s not personal, it’s business.” And impersonal business is depressing. Not to mention, I could not compete with those people who sell every book for a dollar or less, so not only did I not get rich, but I lost money that I could ill afford to lose. I finally wised up and quit and that was a huge relief.
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Edith, I thought you were more into relieving people of their excess money and ending up in the pokey. I didn’t have any idea that you would venture into the hight tech world of selling on the internet.
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very funny, Jim. 🙂 This was my attempt to make some honest money. They say “crime doesn’t pay.” In this case, honest work didn’t pay either.
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My younger brother and I (ages approximately 11 and 9) had a get rich plan in 1959. He would climb the maple tree in the woods and accidentally/on purpose fall out and I would catch him. We would tell our story of great heroics and become amazingly well known and rich from newspaper readers’ donations. Our common sense kicked in and we remain poor and unknown.
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I guess not all visionaries get the recognition they deserve! Welcome to the Trail, Gary. Stop by any time!!!
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HI Gary–
You could still do that now, slight revised. You just have to get your brother to fall out of the neighbors tree…
🙂
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I’m not a financial expert by any means.
Investments certainly can lose value. but it doesn’t have to always be a bad experience.
We have a good financial advisor and I think part of it is this is a guy we genuinely like; and he and his secretary genuinely likes us.
We enjoy our visits with them and spend the first 1/2 of the meeting with his secretary catching up on all our kids. Then we get down to business.
It would certainly be harder if we didn’t like them or it was “just business”.
There are good investment people… it’s just hard to find them sometimes.
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My money-making skills have always been woefully inadequate. Fortunately I’m pretty good at managing what has come my way. But rich I’ll never be.
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I wish I could post more during the day, but my Windows version at work is older, and for some reason I can only type one- letter- at – a- time and it takes forever to get anything written, so I can only post at home.
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The summer that we lived out on the farm with our friends, Janis and I thought we’d can enough vegetables to sell at the Farmers’ Market in Winona. We needed lots more canning jars, so we put this ad in the paper: Tired of tripping over those canning jars in the basement? Call Jan & Barb’s Canning Jar Removal Service: 507-xxx-xxxx. Not only did we get no calls (and therefore no more canning jars), but we lost the money spent on the ad.
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