AdmiGram.com tells a funny and instructive story that demonstrates that you can be enterprising at any age.
When I was very young, I used to help my mom in her pastry shop. Next to us, there was a small square that was favored by elderly gardeners who offered passersby the excess of their harvest. Well, what else should elderly Italians do? As they say, you can gossip and earn a few pennies at the same time. Usually, no more than five of them gathered, selling seasonally grown berries and fruits by hand.
And so it was in July – the season of apricots. Every elderly gardener, who came from the suburban train, brought a bucket of ripe fruit and, for an hour or two, sold the excess of his harvest to passersby. Everything was fine until one grandpa with his own merchandise joined this cozy market. Oh, how much his colleagues disliked him.
This was because, arriving later than others from the suburban train, he always set the price for his apricots at half the price of the others. And, as luck would have it, a little girl with a big bucket suddenly started coming and bought all of the grandpa’s harvest in bulk. The satisfied grandpa went on his way, and the rest were left with their apricots until late in the evening.
The windows in our store were always open, so I heard all sorts of things about the grandpa. I learned words I had never heard before! Of course, nobody was going to hit the grandpa for such low prices, but the elderly businessmen still wanted to teach him a lesson. In the end, one enterprising lady approached that very little wholesale buyer, who was running around at lunchtime to buy apricots, and started a conversation with her.
The girl explained that her grandmother needed the apricots for jam and puree. She said her grandmother told her to buy them where they were cheapest and bring them home until she said to stop. Well, after these words, the most cunning plan for the next day was immediately devised. When the old man arrived as usual, he started selling his apricots for 300 lire per bucket. The neighbors sold theirs for 200. The old man, being as stingy as he was, wrinkled his nose but didn’t lower the price. What a miser.
After a while, the same girl started running over and, in just a few trips, bought all the neighbors’ apricots for 200. The satisfied vendors went home, leaving the old man to ponder his pricing for the rest of the day. He would learn his lesson about price setting! We stood behind the counter in the store with my mother, and it was almost pitiful to see the old man. He stood there all alone with his apricots, 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 of apricots, who had bought them all up half an hour ago, came up and gave them to the old man. And the price wasn’t 300 anymore, not even 400, but a whopping 600! Now, that’s something!
It turned out that the girl was his granddaughter. As for the old man, when he was young, he was quite the businessman. He made a small fortune at the Milan market. If it weren’t for the war in the 1940s, he would have been a millionaire. That’s how he used to work with his friends back then – they’d lower the price on something, buy everything themselves, and then sell it to everyone else at a much higher price.
My mother and I had a good laugh. We promised not to reveal his cunning scheme.
