Lemonade Stand Meme

Not a news story, but a recent episode of Dan Vs. on The Hub network. If you aren’t familiar with the series, it follows the episodic conflicts of a cranky guy in his late 20s/early 30s with some aspect of modern life. Here’s the description of this episode:

Dan starts a crusade against a gang of thuggish children who are aggressively selling lemonade outside his apartment building.

So, no, the cartoon has nothing to do with the right wing’s bucolic image of children innocently selling lemonade to grateful thirsty adults — it just undermines it. Woohoo!

How strong is public sentiment concerning little girls and lemonade stands? Strong enough to force a police chief in Appleton, WI to apologize for one of his officers enforcing the law and describing it as “not our finest hour.”

Ten-year-old Lydia Coenen and her 9-year-old sister Vivian Coenen were near their Appleton home Sunday morning, preparing to sell lemonade to people heading to a car show. But an officer told them the sales were prohibited by city ordinance.

The law went into effect last month and bars licensed vendors from selling food and drinks within a two-block radius of a special event.

Police have apologized to the family. Police Chief David Walsh says he’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Selective enforcement of the law is the American way, kids!

BTW, if you were recently beaten, tazed or shot by the police, don’t expect an apology to come as swiftly as these sweet little girls received.

This story is not about Teh Evil Bureaucrats shutting down a child’s lemonade stand, but I include it here to offer some contrast: even a vendor with a hawker’s or peddler’s permit still faces opposition from competing businesses. In Taunton, MA*, a lemonade stand franchise business recently set up a stand near a newly built local court house, upsetting brick-and-mortar businesses in the neighborhood. Adding an odd twist to this story, one of the owner’s of this franchise is running for mayor.

The franchisees — City Councilor and mayoral candidate Thomas Hoye and his partner James Gracia — say they’re simply trying to augment their primary business venture, an ice cream and frozen lemonade shop on Winthrop Street called Tom & Jimmy’s Ice Cream Parlor.

But two longtime business owners on the Broadway block are nervous that the summertime stand will cost them sales, by means of waylaying potential customers from patronizing their establishments.

“We had three years of heartache, and now should be the time to reap the harvest, and I can’t because they’re in between (us and the trial court),” said Tom “Tommy” Clark.

The 79-year-old Clark, owner of Park News at 30 Broadway, said he’s unhappy, especially after having endured sustained inconveniences — mainly the loss of parking spaces — during construction of the $80 million courthouse project.

Clark, who with wife Anna has run the newspaper and magazine shop since 1950, reasons it’s not just cold beverage sales that he’s losing to impulse buyers stopping off at the frozen lemonade stand.

He says it could diminish sales of unrelated product such as lottery tickets, tobacco products and candy bars. And he says he’s the one with the overhead.

“They don’t pay rent, and they pay minimal taxes,” Clark said of the lemonade franchisees.

Next door at Jimmy’s Restaurant, owner James Mitoulis is worried that the presence of the lemonade mobile stand will snowball so that food vendors from other areas will be tempted to flock to the trial court block.

There is more to the story, including more from the franchisees, as well as comments debating the issue below the article. To be clear, I am not taking a side on this issue; for one thing, I don’t live there, so I don’t know the local politics. I don’t have “a dog in this fight,” as the saying goes. But I think the story highlights the business environment concerns that arise whenever someone sets up a seemingly innocent lemonade stand. Here we have an established local business that went through the necessary bureaucratic hoops to obtain permits to sell lemonade around the parks and other public places, and even when obeying the regulations of the permit, their presence still pisses people off, justifiably or not. Is it any wonder that local authorities will shut down an operation working without a permit?

*

Not the tauntaun you’re looking for.

Outraged by the “three little girls” story, Sarah The Healthy Home Economist calls for civil disobedience.

This government harassment of normal, everyday activities by citizens has simply got to stop. I hope the people of Midway, Georgia express their outrage to the local authorities.

Perhaps the cutting of local and state government budgets across the country will have a silver lining over time .. fewer government workers and increasingly cash strapped budgets may mean less – or even a cessation of this stupid type of government behavior.

In the meantime, it could be high time for some well placed Civil Disobedience.  Citizens need to stop rolling over on this stuff.  Would the police dare to cuff a Mom or Dad who told them to get lost or come back with a warrant if they tried to shut down their children’s lemonade stand?

I can think of a lot of issues we should be using civil disobedience methods to protest against. Granted, a lot of those issues involve preserving public sector jobs against right wing assaults on collective bargaining, or providing a free public education, or giving every citizen access to quality health care, regardless of their ability to afford it. Other issues involve quagmire wars and violations of civil liberties and rights that are far more fundamental than the right to sell lemonade on my front lawn.

You can’t make this stuff up:

Quietly, the Obama government has expanded the scope and reach of the nation’s lemonade stand destroyers.  Until he is out of office and America elects a new chief of police that gets what capitalism is really about the economy will be mired in the mud in my opinion.

To his credit, the author preceded this statement with a Both Sides Do It caveat. I think that’s to his credit. Or just a rhetorical gesture that means nothing.

This is the kind of commentary these stories inspire.

It is a sad day for American’s when children get fined for a lemonade stand.

You know what were happy days for Americans? When unregulated bankers and investors destroyed out economy. Or Abu Ghraib.

That is exactly what happened in Montgomery County, Maryland to six children trying to make a few bucks.

Actually, they were raising money for a charity (good!) amidst licensed food vendors who had obtained the necessary permits to operate near the U.S. Open, a very lucrative site. The parents of the kids are to blame for not doing the same. A good cause does not excuse violating the law.

The stand was intended for fun and refreshment, but that came to an end when a local cameraman from the local news spotted a country inspector that was issuing a five hundred dollar fine to the children.

Actually, the fine was to the parents. An inspector wouldn’t fine children. Also, here are a few questions: Was the fine immediately laid, or did the mom refuse to budge after the inspector informed her they were in violation of the law? What was the interaction between inspector and mom like?

Right. I’m sure that six children selling lemonade outside of the US Open was a severe threat to the safety of those around them. Sure, governmental agencies are forced to uphold these laws, and sure, the laws themselves do not discriminate between children and adults. They are in place to stop illegal vendors who set themselves up outside of sporting events.

Which is what this stand was: illegal. And according to the inspector’s report, large. They were in direct competition with legitimate businesses. And again, the stand was supervised by the mom, so the fine was laid upon the mom, not the kids. As for the safety - one way to ensure that is to observe proper health standards, which is what food vendor permits are meant to uphold.

The country inspector should have used better judgment, because all this ticket did was stir up a lot of bad press for them. By the end of the day, the fine had been dropped and the children were forced to move their stand down the street.

So, in other words, the fine had its intended effect: remove the stand from direct competition with legitimate vendors. The local news story provides an update reporting the resolution to this conflict. Also included, the inspector’s side of the story:

“This is not big bad bureaucracy coming down on little kids,” Hughes explained.   She said the inspector was enforcing regulations designed to address concerns about traffic, safety and other non permitted vendors flooding into the area.

Hughes noted the kid’s lemonade operation was serving bottled drinks out of 4 large coolers under a 10X10 tent.  “This is not what you would see when you picture a typical lemonade stand,” she said.

Another story of three little kids trying to operate a lemonade stand against the winds of authority. I wonder how often the number three pops up in this meme? So far this story and the U.S. Open story feature three kids. I’ve already made a hash tag to keep track of this element.

Here’s the official reason for the bust:

That city law requires a business and food permits ($50 a day), even if the stand was at the home of one of the girls.

Health issues were also a concern, Morningstar said. “We were not aware of how the lemonade was made, who made the lemonade, of what the lemonade was made with, so we acted accordingly by city ordinance,” he said.

Edited to add: BTW, the three “little” girls include a ten-year-old and a fourteen-year-old. I thought you stop being “little” when puberty strikes.

This is the first story that inspired this blog.

Three kids attempting to sell lemonade near the U.S. Open were shut down and fined $500 by a county inspector in Maryland. Although the county tends to overlook small stands, which are against the law, the inspector noted the unusually large size of the operation, as well as the lack of proper permits. Also, other vendors were warned and cited for similar reasons.

But cue the outrage:

But dozens of residents with homes near the US Open have been allowed to let visitors park their cars on their property because they paid the county $300.

Golf fans were being charged as much as $60 a day to park their cars with some neighbours reportedly raking in tens of thousands of dollars.

Mrs Marriott told WUSA9 she was having a hard time reconciling the two different perspectives on entrepreneurship at the US Open.

She said: ‘The message to kids is, there’s no American dream.’