
Country Time Lemonade Will Pay Legal Fees for Unlicensed Lemonade Stands - ca98am79
http://www.mymoneyblog.com/country-time-lemonade-stand-legalade.html
======
sumoboy
You wouldn't know lemonade stands were shutdown if social media didn't expose
it. But what it should be is a lesson for cities to adopt a young entrepreneur
license for like $10/year. There will always be some angry a-hole who will
call the cops or HOA idiot whining.

My suburbia neighborhood there were people who wanted to share books with
people freely in a small mailbox near the curb, like a mini-library. Someone
started whining and the city was like "it's illegal to have such a structure"
so once it hit the news people went crazy over the stupidity of the cities
response.

I always stop for the bad lemonade at these stands, even tell these kids how
to market better with better signs that you can read. I remember knocking on
doors selling vegetable seed packets, shoveling snow and whatever to make a
few bucks to really appreciate the dollar. I think it's a great PR idea,
definitely a creative video, and everytime they intervene it's another story.

~~~
ashelmire
I don't think the issue is just one that young people experience.

There's an active fight against entry-level entrepreneurship in terms of fees
just to start a business that may not be profitable enough (at least in the
short term) to justify the fees.

I get why some of the laws exist - for food, fear of health risks, for
business more generally, fear that taxes won't be paid or people will be
inconvenienced by street vendors. But they are onerous and we'd be better off
without them, in my opinion. Let people start small businesses and don't
require licenses or fees until they make a threshold above a living wage (30k
or so / year).

~~~
reaperducer
_> There's an active fight against entry-level entrepreneurship in terms of
fees just to start a business_

This is illustrated well if you peruse the internet fora used by
Uber/Lyft/rideshare drivers.

Some locations require no licensing at all. Some require just supplemental
insurance. Some pile up city/state/local/inspection/insurance fees in the
hundreds of dollars just to get started.

In Las Vegas, there are annual state and county licensing fees totaling about
$225. But a rideshare driver picking someone up at the airport and taking them
to MGM, for example, only makes about $3.00 after expenses for what can easily
be 45 minutes of time spent (staging + travel + loading + unloading + return
to staging).

Yes, the problem is really the amount that rideshare drivers make in some
cities. But that's a discussion for another time. The point is that all the
licensing fees are a barrier to entry for a job that's supposed to be entry-
level.

~~~
Retric
Taxi where initially regulated back when they where horse and buggies to for
two main reasons. Reduce traffic on public roads, and increase daily incomes
by reducing numbers of drivers.

Ride sharing services don't really change anything it's still extra traffic
and over time horrid wages.

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Matt3o12_
This seems to be PR move since not a lot of people can participate and only
$300 of the legal fees are reimbursed:

> Open to legal residents of the 50 U.S. (including D.C.), who are the parents
> or legal guardians of a child 14 years of age or younger operating a
> lemonade stand. Program ends 11:59pm ET on 8/31/18 or when $60,000 worth of
> offers have been awarded, whichever comes first. For complete Terms and
> Conditions, including status of available offers, and all other details,
> visit countrytimelegalade.com.

> [From the article]: You can’t even be 13 or younger to participate due to
> child privacy laws

Nevertheless, aren’t there any laws that help such “hobbies“ (considering how
little money that should make, and that underage children are voluntarily
“working”, one can’t really call it a “business”.

~~~
chrisseaton
I don’t think it’s just about being a business - it’s also about not being
inspected properly for health reasons isn’t it? The same problems exist I
believe for volunteers who prepare food for homeless people.

~~~
balabaster
I don't think I'll ever really understand this law. If you invite someone into
your home for a meal (that you don't charge for), you're not subjected to
health department regulation. How _exactly_ is it different to prepare food
for homeless people in your home? What if you invite them for dinner instead
of taking it _to_ them? Why are you subject to regulations in one scenario but
not the other, given that the end goal is identical - _to give away food to
people who want to eat._

Genuine question... I don't get it.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Food regulations are for health. When you feed your own family and friends,
fine. When you ramp up to feeding dozens or hundreds, then you can make a
whole community sick with one mistake in the kitchen.

Its a practical threshold to help avoid spread of disease. Not an ivory-tower
absolute. Local municipalities can and do vary on the details.

~~~
balabaster
Okay, I understand this point.

But I also see community events where they grab half a dozen barbecues and
feed thousands of people. Untrained volunteers manning the barbecues, that
haven't been inspected and lord knows when they were last cleaned. Nobody
seems to care, in fact most people in the community seem to love these, _me
included_ \- paying for the possibility of getting sick just because
"barbecuueeee." </homer>

There seems to be extremely large grey areas where enforcement turns a blind
eye, no matter how the regulations are written. I'm not complaining by any
means, I _love_ community barbecues and social events and I would _hate_ to
see health regulators interfering with their spirit, but it seems as though
they pick and choose what they enforce and ignore based entirely on the mood
of the supervisor on any given day.

~~~
chrisseaton
> but it seems as though they pick and choose what they enforce and ignore
> based entirely on the mood of the supervisor on any given day

More charitably, I'd say they use their professional judgement and assess
risk.

~~~
balabaster
I would agree - more charitably :P

I say this as a dispassionate observer - sometimes it seems their professional
judgment is less professional and more emotional and their risk assessment
based on whether or not they'll catch hell for ignoring it or if anyone will
care.

------
ourmandave
Is the system Working As It Should when a 6-year-old has to lawyer up?

~~~
throwaway5752
Where do you draw the line. Equal protection is far more important than
ensuring 6 year olds access to the free market.

Would Starbucks be immune from health inspections and the other standard
obligations of running a food business if they simply put a 5 year old as a
figurehead CEO and had the COO run the ship?

I'm not trolling. A company is obligated to maximize shareholder value within
the law. It's like AAPL and GOOGL's tax maneuvering with the double
Irish/Dutch sandwich techniques - unless they are illegal a company can be
sued for not doing them.

edit: seriously, and how do you define "stand" ... can a 6 year old have a
fleet of food trucks? what if they unintentionally (or intentionally, if you
actually have spent time with 6 year olds...) adulterate the food and harm
people? Can they be tried as adults? This is a silly controversy to whip up
indignant people that aren't willing to think the issue through sufficiently.
It's below the dignity of this forum, such as it is.

edit 2: to explain to downvoter(s) ... part of the obligation of writing laws
is to prevent abuse. It's hard, and you have to consider aggressive seekers of
loopholes. In a better world, and with better people you'd avoid having any
law in the first place and leave it to the discretion of local authorities.
But if that's the case, the downside is silly exceptions like this when local
authorities judgement is something you disagree with.

~~~
landryraccoon
I think a sole proprietorship with no employees run by a 6 year old should
have a degree of latitude. There's no situation I can imagine where a
C-corporation or organization with employees would be off the hook, no matter
how old their mascot is.

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jtsnow
Utah has passed legislation to protect lemonade stands and other childhood
businesses. This has spurred weekend child entrepreneur markets.

See [https://fee.org/articles/lemonade-stands-legalized-in-
utah/](https://fee.org/articles/lemonade-stands-legalized-in-utah/)

------
joshuahedlund
I remember getting outraged by some outrage-inducing article a few years back,
but after seeing the kids in my neighborhood year after year now I wonder, was
that just a viral exception? What percent of unlicensed lemonade stands get
shut down these days anyway?

~~~
cujo
Every time I see one of those outrage inducing articles, I assume there was a
lot of backstory missed and this is just how the situation bubbled up.

For example, if a neighbor calls in a kid's lemonade stand, I'm assuming that
neighbor has had multiple issues with that family and can't make any headway,
so shit just blows up. I'm not saying it's right, but I doubt someone just
wakes up and says "HELL NO!" to an 8 year old's 3 hour project on the
sidewalk.

~~~
IncRnd
> _I 'm not saying it's right, but I doubt someone just wakes up and says
> "HELL NO!" to an 8 year old's 3 hour project on the sidewalk._

That's exactly what happens, though. There are busybodies, who missed their
true calling as bureaucrats, all over the place.

~~~
EliRivers
Oh yes. Sometimes they also don't like the garden flamingoes, or people drying
their laundry. There is a simple joy to be had, I suspect, in buying a shed
load of the flamingoes and planting them all over the lawn :)

------
CodeSheikh
HOA is a metaphorical termite. If you are planning on buying a new house buy
into some old neighborhood. It i not worth dealing with them just for the sake
of someone cutting your grass once a week.

~~~
fixermark
As with many things, it goes both ways.

One of the neighborhoods in my town had a neighbor run a Nazi flag up the
flagpole in his front yard, just because some homeowners are real-life
edgelords. They would have appreciated having a blanket HOA rule about
maintaining property values and "eyesores" to fall back on, because in the
absence of such, it turned out to be pretty difficult in the American legal
environment to find anything with which they could compel him to take the flag
down.

On the other hand, I've seen a different neighborhood try to use the local
covenants to ban a backyard solar farm, because they argued solar panels are
uniformly an eyesore. Tools are tools; people use them.

~~~
driverdan
> it turned out to be pretty difficult in the American legal environment to
> find anything with which they could compel him to take the flag down.

Pretty difficult? It should be impossible. Remember that pesky constitutional
amendment that guarantees free speech? It applies.

~~~
fixermark
It does apply, but it's unclear whether it leads to optimal outcomes.

Germany has outlawed public displays of Nazi symbols; it doesn't have the
problems of overt fascism that the US is currently struggling with. Perhaps it
has merely replaced them with covert fascism, and perhaps this is merely
correlation that doesn't imply causation. But I get the distinct impression
that such is not actually the case; that legal disapproval of naziism in
Germany re-enforces general disapproval.

Plus, America's First Amendment doesn't uniformly guarantee freedom of speech.
Hate speech, for example, and incitement to riot, are two categories that are
generally not considered protected. I don't think flying a Nazi flag falls
under either of those (though if one _really_ squints hard, it could set a
person up for much worse---the US negotiated a peace with Germany after World
War II, but not with the Nazi party. One could make a claim that flying an
enemy flag on American soil is tantamount to claiming that territory has been
conquered, which opens the situation up to military intervention ;) ).

~~~
driverdan
> Hate speech, for example...

Of course that's protected. The only thing that isn't protected is a clear and
timely threat like your example of inciting a riot.

------
rayiner
Never too early to teach kids to fight the overbearing regulatory state.

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duxup
Is this "real"? The website for it seems kinda silly-ish.

[https://www.countrytimelegalade.com](https://www.countrytimelegalade.com)

------
sharemywin
inciting civil disobedience for corporate purposes. What could go wrong?

Are we slowly conditioning our children to take up arms to defend corporations
against "we the people"?

~~~
wooter
seriously? the blame is on government, local or otherwise, for criminalizing
safe, voluntary interactions. requiring licenses of children operating a
lemonade stand is indoctrinating a serious level of statism, which
historically has had far more victims.

~~~
sharemywin
you want a stupid little law like that overturned get a petition and take it
to your local city counsel.

------
circa
Also, I still love that Geico Ice T Lemonade commercial. One of the very very
few commercials I enjoyed.

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brandonmenc
I'm almost 40 years old, grew up mostly in the burbs, and I never ran a
lemonade stand, nor have I ever in my entire life seen kids running a lemonade
stand.

I'm betting this hasn't really been a "tradition" since the 1950s.

Get a paper route - at least then you won't be giving anyone food poisoning.

------
circa
Wow they really go after ANY small businesses, don't they!?

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dpeck
take it for what it is folks, a good promotion.

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mkirklions
Is there a link to something better than a blog?

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buro9
As a UK person without context of the background, this was a little hard to
make sense of.

AFAICT there's some gig economy company called Country Time Lemonade who have
managed to get a workforce of child labour for free, and yet it is the stall
(small business) that requires a permit and so the startup behind it is
offering refunds on the permit fees?

What have I got wrong?

~~~
tonyarkles
Country Time Lemonade isn't a "gig economy company". It's a powdered lemonade
product that's been for sale for a long time. [https://www.amazon.ca/Country-
Time-Lemonade-Drink-82-5-Ounce...](https://www.amazon.ca/Country-Time-
Lemonade-Drink-82-5-Ounce/dp/B00FN6HK9U)

There's a long "tradition" of kids setting up a little lemonade stand on the
side of the road and selling glasses of lemonade for 50 cents or whatever to
get a bit of extra spending money during their summer break from school. This
is typically just a random table from their parents house, a sign made out of
a sheet of paper, and pitchers of lemonade.

~~~
bmj
Related: is anyone old enough to have played this game on their old Apple
computer?

[https://archive.org/details/Lemonade_Stand_1979_Apple](https://archive.org/details/Lemonade_Stand_1979_Apple)

~~~
troupe
Yes! I played through it on an emulator with my kids a few months ago.

------
fixermark
"Big company subverts local ownership of governance with massive amounts of
money."

I'm not sure if this is a feel-good success story or a case study in the flaws
of capitalism in an increasingly-connected global society.

