AdmiGram.com tells a funny and heartwarming story proving that you can be entrepreneurial at any age.
When I was very young, I used to help my mom in her pastry shop. Next to us was a small square favored by elderly gardeners who sold their extra produce to passersby. Well, what else should elderly Italians do? As they say, you can gossip and earn a few bucks at the same time. Usually, no more than five of them gathered, selling seasonal berries and fruits by hand.
And so it was in July — apricot season. Every elderly gardener coming off the commuter train brought a bucket of ripe fruit and spent an hour or two selling their surplus. Everything was fine until another grandpa joined this cozy market. Oh, how his colleagues disliked him!
This was because, arriving later than the others from the train, he always set his apricot prices at half of what everyone else was charging. And, as luck would have it, a little girl with a big bucket suddenly started showing up and buying out the grandpa’s entire harvest in bulk. The satisfied grandpa would go on his way, leaving the rest of the vendors stuck with their apricots until late evening.
The windows in our store were always open, so I heard all sorts of grumbling about the grandpa. I learned words I had never heard before! Of course, nobody was going to get violent over low prices, but the elderly businessmen still wanted to teach him a lesson. In the end, one enterprising lady approached that little wholesale buyer running around at lunchtime and struck up a conversation.
The girl explained that her grandmother needed the apricots for jam and puree. She said her grandma told her to buy them wherever they were cheapest and keep bringing them home until told to stop. Well, hearing this, the neighbors immediately cooked up a cunning plan for the next day. When the old man arrived as usual, he set his price at 300 lire per bucket. The neighbors, trying to outsmart him, lowered theirs to 200. The old man, stubborn as he was, wrinkled his nose but refused to drop his price. What a miser.
After a while, the same girl ran over and, in just a few trips, bought all the neighbors’ apricots for 200 lire. The satisfied vendors went home, leaving the old man to rethink his pricing for the rest of the day. That would teach him a lesson about price-cutting! My mother and I stood behind the counter, and it was almost pitiful to see him. He stood there all alone with his buckets, with nobody else around.
My mother made some tea, gave me a bun, and told me to go outside and offer it to the poor man. Just as I stepped out the door — bam! The same girl with the bucket, who had bought up all the neighbors’ apricots half an hour ago, walked up and handed them to the old man. And the price wasn’t 300 anymore, not even 400, but a whopping 600 lire! Now, that’s a plot twist!
It turned out the girl was his granddaughter. As for the old man, he had been quite the businessman in his youth. He made a small fortune at the Milan market, and if it weren’t for the war in the 1940s, he would have been a millionaire. That’s exactly how he used to operate with his partners back then — they’d artificially drive the price down, buy up the entire supply, and then sell it back to everyone else at a premium.
My mother and I had a good laugh. We promised not to give away his clever scheme.
