Amber and Jill Thomas' lemonade stand became the latest casualty this week in a seemingly endless litany of banks and businesses to founder despite repeated pleas from Congressional Democrats for emergency assistance.
The Thomas' lemonade stand, which, in the past, has yielded profits upwards of 300 percent, has seen revenues plummet over the past three years - from $39.00 in fiscal 2006 to $14.57 this past year - due in large part to Amber's Saturday afternoon piano lessons and Jill's six-week summertime stints at Unicorn Acres Girls' Day Camp.
"You just cannot overstate the toll that Jill's summer absences have taken on the business," said Rick Bradley, an analyst with Frost and Sullivan, an international business consulting firm based in Palo Alto, California. "Jill runs that stand like it's a federal bank; not one cup is out of place, not one granule of mix goes unaccounted for. It's no coincidence that their stand was among the highest grossing under-ten businesses on Oakview Lane for three years running."
When asked about the factors that have most contributed to their past success, Jill Thomas, who turns eight on Friday, said, "We use Dora the Explorer cups. And sometimes, when it gets hot out, we eat popsicles. My favorite flavor's purple."
Added her 6-year-old sister Amber, "I'm a princess!"
But the Thomas' success has also produced its share of economic casualties. 10-year-old Marty "The Farty" Madsen, former owner and operator of My Stuf (sic) for Sale, lived just two houses down from the sisters' once thriving business. "I used to make more than five dollars a week and sometimes more during summer break," complained Madsen. But that was before Jill and Amber started selling their stupidhead lemonade that tastes like pee."
Losing most of his customers to the Thomas sisters, Madsen grudgingly shuttered the doors of his once lucrative operation in May of 2008.
"It's kinda' sad what happened to Farty," said 11-year-old Owen Peterson, one of Madsen's former clients. "This one time, he sold me a whole mess of Lite-Bright pegs, a Boba Fett, an Ichiro rookie card, two gummy worms, and his pet hamster, Sushi, who humps Quaker oatmeal boxes - all for three bucks. I had to give Sushi back the next day, though, 'cause my Mom said that any hamster that did that was a messenger of Satan. But still - those kinds of deals just aren't out there anymore."
Bradley agreed, adding that if anyone needed a financial bailout package, it was Madsen - "not Citicorp, not Wamu or JP Morgan, and definitely not two sisters who may or may not be adding to this country's obesity epidemic."
Since going out of business, life has taken an inauspicious turn for Madsen who, currently attending Mrs. Watkins' fourth grade class at Peak Avenue Elementary, has been reduced to carrying out the bidding of older students for scant fees. Said fifth-grader Timmy Acres, "During recess, we wrestle some of the littler kids to the ground and then have Marty fart on their faces for a dollar." Acres then added, "If it makes them barf a little, we give him two."
With the Thomas sisters' stretch of lemonade-selling dominance in jeopardy, the elder sister, Jill, was seen on Capitol Hill Thursday pleading her case to lawmakers. However, a 3-hour closed-door meeting with Senate leaders and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson seemingly left more questions than answers.
"One of our biggest concerns about giving the Thomas sisters' lemonade stand a no-strings-attached bailout package is their continual reluctance to modify or augment their business model in any way," said Paulson. "These changes we're asking for need not be sweeping; everyone already knows how good they are at selling lemonade. But are they also willing to extend hours of operation to say, maybe, two hours a week? And what if - what if - instead of sometimes taking scratch-'n-sniff stickers or Hello Kitty buttons or even Tiger Beat pinups of the Jonas Brothers as payment for cups of lemonade, what if they always charged money for every cup? And finally, perhaps Amber could also refrain from picking and eating her own boogers during hours of operation. Not that I'm judging. I mean, goddammit, I'm Henry Paulson, Secretary of the U.S. fucking Treasury and I even occasionally eat my own boogers - but never, ever when I'm on the clock. It's called professionalism."
Paulson's brusque words and the Senate's seemingly inevitable rejection of the Thomas sisters' bailout plea sent stock indexes reeling on Friday, as the Dow Jones Industrials plummeted 318 points or 3.7 percent.
Hi Brock,
Global Resource Bank
www.grb.net
Paulson: "Political economy put us on the hook." - Dec. 2008
What is economical about politics?
GRB bails out everyone stuck in this bullshit.
Debora Perkins turned me on to your blog. Good stuff.
Cheers
John
Posted by: John Pozzi | January 25, 2009 at 08:22 AM