What is the “Best 20”, anyhow???
I completely understand your puzzlement and wonder — and I’ll be only too happy to explain:
You send me $25. I go to bank, “buy plenty wampum”, to quote Stan Freberg, meaning I get a $25 box of U.S. in-circulation business-strike pennies from the bank, bring the box home with YOUR name on it, and begin plundering the box on your behalf.
Why? For money? Continue reading
Here’s the machine we got for the shop! It’s a Carnival King 8 oz. popcorn popper, which is plenty enough production for the crowd we get, even in a street fair, which is rare enough that we can rent if we need something bigger and faster, which we presently don’t.
The idea is not so much “to sell popcorn” — although that might be a very good business thriving business in itself, just plain old popcorn, but we have an angle that makes our popcorn very different from all other popcorns.
It’s the spice.
Anyone who knows anything about Arrakis knows that spice is always at the bottom of any deal.
Popcorn is exempt from some local and regional and all federal food-handler licensing. Ben Franklin’s arts & crafts store has a big commercial popcorn machine in the front of the shop — they give away bags of popcorn to incoming customers, being careful to avoid serving them to those inevitable folks who show up every day for a bag of popcorn and quickly run out the door when they’ve got it.
You can’t afford to give away stuff forever, and at some point, you’ll learn to charge for it so you can keep doing your public service, thus fulfilling your Bodhisattva Vow, the one you took in a previous lifetime.
It’s time to settle that debt. Popcorn is a good beginning, spicy popcorn doubly so.
We sell our Zombie Family Red Hot Popcorn Spice in a special spice bottle, and we offer the spice in sample form, by sprinkling a generous amount of our incredibly hot “salsa caliente” on the hot salted or unsalted popcorn as it’s bagged up, and offer a fair special to take home, two bottles for only $25, which is a LOT of popcorn spice that could outlast the planet.
So how to turn this into a street hustle? Continue reading
I asked myself what someone who has little money could actually accomplish to get the homeless back home again, and this is what I came up with — The Lucky Penny.
It has to be hand-searched, not bought in rolls, and it has to be unusually brilliant and unusually lucky to have been found, which covers a very slim territory, meaning that they aren’t all that easy to find, if you’re looking for speed-search.
The captured coins need to then be packaged, first in the small sleeve, then in the large packet, along with a backing card that contains the information about the coin, why it’s so lucky, etc.
Pennies From Heaven is a way of thinking. Let’s look at the situation of the homeless — first of all, there is no “the” homeless, every case is different, and money is not the only reason someone ends up on the street or in a tent city, and none of those reasons makes the victim at fault, but that’s where society places them.
So with little or no personal money, where do I even START???
Okay, first of all, you can’t FEED someone off the street. You can feed the body some food some of the time, but you’ll have to get money to do that, and while you’re getting the money for the food, who’s cooking it?
Then who delivers it, and to whom, and with what plates, knives, forks, spoons, cups?
It’s a LOT more complicated than one person can handle, but there IS a way to help and at the same time do some service and get some Merit.
Merit is the ticket that buys you out of this lower swamp level, and nothing else will do it. You need Merit, and that’s not just “good deeds” or “good intentions”.
Those and a couple of bucks MIGHT get you on a city bus, but it WON’T get you off The Wheel anytime soon.
There is no DIRECT ROUTE from homeless to employed and living at home. It’s a hard and complex road that must be taken step by step, but here’s the thing — if you merely feed the homeless, they may survive, but they still have no hope. Continue reading