The Egg Business Circa 1992

My brother and I had various money making schemes growing up. They originated with us trying to sell our toys to each other, or food out of the refrigerator to my parents claiming we were a "toy store," or "restaurant" respectively.  We quickly learned that trying to sell people their own property was not only questionably unethical, but not all that lucrative.  We were looking for the big score, and we knew we had to expand our horizons in order to make any real cash.

Enter the chickens.  My parents were kind enough to give us a 4H-ish experience growing up that included chickens, ducks, rabbits, dogs, and cats.  We had a chicken coop at the end of our property that my father spent HOURS trying to wild-animal proof (It took a couple of tries and we lost a few fowl in the process).  Once the Taj Mahal/ Fort Knox of chicken coops was completed those chickens must have felt a knew-found sense of security because the eggs started flowing.  I mean, A LOT of eggs.  Sometimes several dozen every week depending on the rotation of live chickens at any given time.

After hearing my parents complain about us having too many eggs my seven year old business savvy was alerted, and I realized we (the chickens?) were sitting on brown and white gold mine.  (Not all eggs are white, for those of you who didn't grow up in the sticks).

My business plan was as follows: My brother and I would take our red wagon, fill it full of eggs, pull it up and down our street where we would go door to door selling the eggs for 50 cents a piece.

Well, the plan was doomed from the beginning.  Observe:

We didn't live on a street.  
We lived on a dirt road.  We didn't take into account the forces of physics involved in dragging the rickety wheels of a little red wagon over the rocks and pot holes of a back-country road, coupled with the fragility of an eggs shell and the cold, hard metal of the inside of the wagon.  Not to mention, our "neighbors" were neighbors in that their homes were also on the dirt road, but they weren't RIGHT next door.  There was a lot of ground to cover between the houses.  Predictably, the first day of the egg business resulted in our product lying in a scrambled mess at the bottom of the red wagon.


My Brother
Brennan's involvement in the business was more of a PR stunt than anything else.   He was SUPER cute, and he had several speech impediments, which I knew would endear any would-be egg buyers.  However, at only four, there was no way he could deal with the difficult addition that was necessary for the egg business, plus he didn't have any knowledge concerning the value of US coins.  He just knew that they were "money" but that was about as far as it went.   Several times I caught him putting the "money" in his pocket, and not in the predesignated corner of the wagon that would serve as our "bank" because he liked money, and he knew that having it in your pocket was a good idea.  This enraged me, and caused me to accuse him of being a thief.

The Price of the Eggs
As someone who, almost twenty years later, buys eggs on a semi-regular basis it's now obvious to me that my price of 50 cents an egg was ludicrous.  Especially because they had zero quality control, and, especially during the summer months, there really was no telling weather or not those eggs were edible.  I was essentially taking advantage of the egg monopoly I had created, and I got too greedy.

Eventually we scrapped the egg business.  We were overcharging, and let's face it: It was a pain to haul those eggs up and down that dirt road.