Remember in the summer when there was always a lemonade stand in every neighborhood? It was a charming addition to our neighborhood landscape.Children have fun while learning lessons valuable in later life. However, most people don't want business signs cluttering their neatly manicured lawns or business traffic disturbing their serene neighborhoods. Enter Planning and Zoning to maintain a balance between business and residential neighborhoods. This is a good thing, but what happens to our friendly lemonade stands?
Here's an example:
In Connecticut, Joey Cadieaux dug nightcrawlers from his back yard and sold them to passing fishermen to get extra money. Okay, this is not lemonade, it's a worm stand. But it is a worm stand run by a young boy who wants to make extra pizza money. A town official stopped that nonsense because Joey did not have a permit for his sign.
Surely we can give a kid a break, especially an industrious entrepreneurial kid. Maybe there should be a special section in the zoning regulations allowing children's enterprises with tasteful signs.
technorati tags: childrenbusiness, politics, lemonadestands, neighborhoodrestrictions, nightcrawlers, jobs, kids,
2 comments:
Hi Vicki,
Same thing happened in Phoenix. Two little girls set up a lemonade stand and the City closed them down because they didn't have a business license to operate a food/beverage stand. Several hundred dollars for the license if I remember correctly.
On the other hand I caught several children stealing mail in our neighborhood, I called the Police and they said they couldn't do anything because they were children (the little boy I caught hanging off our mailbox was about 4 years old and two other boys threw stolen mail in front of my house were 5 or 6) and that we should call the Post Office. So we called the Post Office and they said they couldn't do anything because the theft was by minors.
So I guess the lesson is if you try to earn money by working for it you'll get in trouble, but if you steal you get away scott free.
AZ
AZ -- I want the return of innocence.
When I wrote this post, I kept thinking the parents need to sit out with the lemonade stand because so many kids are snatched from their yards. It's a shame we give them a break when they need some discipline, but not when they could be having fun and learning.
We also need to return them to innocent behaviour -- no fighting, no shooting up their schools, and no neighborhood vandalism!
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