I agree, and a lot of blame can be put at the feet of government.
Posted on 08/08/2005 6:19:03 AM PDT by robowombat
I think you have it wrong. Since the insurance cost is $5,000, your business must be able to generate revenue in the 80K neighborhood before you can seriously consider renting the booth.
Regulators don't care about your problems. If you can't afford to pay the man, you can't play.
A good lesson.
So much depends on where you live. My wife and I live in a part of Virginia that has a very low accident rate, minimal congestion (compared to the larger areas), and fairly low repair rates. She has one speeding ticket. The two of us are insured for two vehicles and we pay about the same amount as your lowest price for one person and one car.
"He said that last Friday, the first day of the fair, he made about $700 by selling 70 of the toys for $9.95 apiece."
Vendors at a local festival were selling these for $5 this past weekend.
E-bay!
Who generates 80K of sales from a fair booth?? Its a good lesson, alright. A lesson that things have to change.
The elected officials in Bangor, ME are mean-spirited.
Or more likely, some kid would think how cool it would be to shoot marshmallows down his, his friends, or his little brother's throat and then they would end up choking on it.
When marshmallows are outlawed.... well, you know the rest.
Thank you, scum-sucking, sleazoid ambulance-chasing vermin.
Your costs are not dependent upon the purity of your motives, the worthiness of your cause, nor your inability to generate revenue.
The cost exists above this.
From my perspective, most business failures are caused by the entrepreneur's failure to estimate what revenue will be required to make the business a success.
The example we are considering emphatically demonstrates this point.
The young blow-gun manufacturer should take the lesson to heart.
I agree, and a lot of blame can be put at the feet of government.
did you notice the double "AND" you have in your quote?
This kid's in the wrong business if he wants to make money. He needs to become a lawyer.
My bet is that one (or more) of the kids who bought one at $9.95 quickly learned that the blowguns not only fired little marshmallows, they could fire round sourballs, choclate malt balls, ballbearings, frozen peas or, maybe, paintballs. Sometimes (but not always), local governmental agengies do things that are not irrational.
actually it would be the jury that did the actual awarding.
Remeber JURIES are the determiners of fact and in the end, liability.
I bet if he called it a marshmellow "injector" instead of shooter, it might have made a difference.
They probably treated it as if it was a real gun.
$10 for about .60 of PVC pipe and 10 minutes of labor....
Marshmallow Shooters are cool, and you gotta love the profit margin.
I had my Cub Scouts make marshmallow shooters last year. It was our best craft ever.
Several bags of mini marshmallows ended up on our back lawn. The birds loved us for weeks after that.
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