The Cherry Salesman

It's cherry season at the Lindsey's. I have posted about our cherries before. This year we had a bumper crop. In the past, I have posted pictures of our cherries and various attempts to keep the birds away. This year we had so many cherries I thought about putting out a sign directing the birds to the tree because we weren't sure what we were going to do with them all. After picking several giant bowls full and giving them to visiting teaching families, etc., we had barely scratched the surface.

Marsha had the brilliant idea of having the kids take the cherries around the neighborhood to sell them. Lauren, Ryan and Joe loaded a big cooler in the wagon and headed out. They had two sizes of bags - the 1 lb. bag went for $2 and the 2 lb. bag went for $4.

Joseph holding a 2 lb. bag of cherries

 Lauren was the route planner. Ryan was the wagon puller / reptile wrangler (He made sure there were no lizards or snakes in the area.) Joseph was the face of the operation. He loves to sell stuff to the neighbors. He has the hard sell down pat (more on that later.)

How could you resist someone like this coming to your door to sell cherries? One family bought 6 lbs. of cherries. Lauren asked what they were going to do with them all. They said they just liked eating them and wanted to have a lot around. Wow!

They were earning money to help send Belle to obedience school. Their goal was $40. They ended up selling all of the cherries in a few hours. They made a grand total of $74. That's lots of lbs. of cherries. Considering the bags were actually about 1.2 and 2.4 lbs. respectively, that would come to a total of over 40 lbs. of cherries. That doesn't include the ones we kept, gave away or the birds ate.

I think we know what Joseph is going to do for his occupation - he is an impressive salesman. In April, he decided he wanted to open a lemonade stand. We decided that would require too much parental involvement. Marsha made the suggestion that he take a less passive approach and sell individual cups of lemonade to the neighbors. He would take a cup and disappear for a few minutes and then come back with a quarter looking for another cup of lemonade. He repeated this pattern several times and brought home quite an impressive number of quarters.

The star salesman

One of our neighbors who is a salesman by trade and more recently has switched to training and recruiting salesman and authoring self-help books about achieving goals and presenting your best self was the recipient of one of Joe's sales calls. He called us later to tell us how it went. He said Joe showed up at his door with his cup of lemonade. He handed it to the neighbor and said, "Here is a cup of lemonade. I need a quarter for that." The neighbor was cracking up, but asked if he could use that approach in some of his training material. "No is not an option."

Maybe he will take over A+ Pest Control when the original owners retire.