It ain’t easy being a kidpreneur. Or at least not nearly as easy as it should be.
Entrepreneurial youngsters across the country have been starting their own businesses selling water, mowing lawns and the old classic, operating lemonade stands. And the adults around them? They’re calling the cops.
Alison Ettel, better known as #PermitPatty, called the police on an 8-year-old San Francisco girl, Jordan Rogers, for the offense of “selling water without a permit.” One would think Ettel, now the former CEO of a cannabis company, would be a bit more mellow.
After her mother lost her job, Jordan was selling water in order to raise money for a family trip to Disneyland. Ettel’s call to police put that trip in jeopardy, all because she claimed she didn’t like how Jordan was yelling about the water she was selling.
There aren’t a lot of jobs where teens can earn six figures. Mowing lawns is one of them.
Recently, Moneyish profiled one of those teens, RJ Duarte of Colorado, explaining, “A 17-year-old high school senior in Golden, Colo., Duarte started mowing lawns alongside his brother when he was 6 or 7. Now he juggles school, college visits and the demands of his company, Green Worx Landscaping, which offers lawn care, cleanups, snow removal and more in Colorado and is on track, Duarte says, to pull in a little over $100,000 this year.”
Ohio teen Reggie Fields is cut from the same cloth. He runs Mr. Reggie’s Lawn Cutting Service in the Cleveland suburb of Maple Heights. He has his cousins and his brothers and sisters working for him at just 12 years old. You’d think he’d be admired for taking the initiative, and he is — but not by the neighbor who called the police because Reggie had the temerity to mow part of her lawn by mistake.
To their credit, members of Reggie’s community have rallied around him, and Mr. Reggie’s has dozens of new clients and plans to diversify to leaf raking and snow removal. “The City of Maple Heights is extremely proud of these young entrepreneurs!” Mayor Annette M. Blackwell said, calling the episode “a very heartwarming story and testament to the great children and generous people that live here.”
Despite the public support for Jordan and Reggie, the fear of running afoul of authorities and nasty busybodies is legitimate. Luckily for both youngsters, their parents were nearby armed with cellphone cameras and their stories went viral. But for other kids and their parents, the worry could prevent any number of kid entrepreneurs from opening shop.
New Yorkers looking for a break from the oppressive heat may find fewer fresh lemonade stands, too. Kids need a Temporary Food Service Establishment permit to open one — “even if their profits are going to charities,” notes the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
Nationally, it’s enough of a concern that the lemonade company Country Time announced it would create a team to help pay fines and permits for kids nationwide who want to run their own lemonade stands, calling its initiative Legal-Ade.
It’s a noble use of resources (not to mention good p.r. for the company) but it’s the wrong tactic. Instead of paying the fees levied by police for children operating their own stands, towns should change the laws; kids running lemonade stands shouldn’t have to apply for permits or pay fines for running their own businesses.
It’s not just the bother: We’re disincentivizing the kind of habit-forming we should be encouraging in young people. After all, teen employment rates are falling. According to USA Today, “In 1978, 58 percent of teens had summer jobs, the highest rate of teen summer employment. Between the 1940s and the 1980s, the all-time low was 46 percent in 1963.” In 2016, it was down to 43 percent.
In the absence of reforming or repealing nonsensical laws, the battlefield will be public opinion. After Alison Ettel called the police on Jordan for selling water, public pressure mounted and she soon lost her own job, ironically enough for a company selling cannabis for pets, despite the fact that cannabis isn’t regulated or approved for use on animals. Mob justice is far from ideal, but the irony of Ettel losing her livelihood after trying to take it away from a kid is hard to miss.
Bethany Mandel is a part-time editor at Ricochet and columnist at the Jewish Daily Forward.