Hacker News Reader

Comment by sumoboy | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

> 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.

You mean a Little Free Library? https://littlefreelibrary.org/

They have some good tips on the website navigaing zoning rules: https://littlefreelibrary.org/deal-zoning-regulations-spence...

We have these all over my city in Canada. I'm not sure if they're exactly Little Free Library. I went to a small town in the country the other day and they had a "pantry" with which you could exchange preserves.

You got to remember why these rules were put in place: because assholes and scam artists abused the rules and ran rampant in neighborhoods in the 90s. I remember having to fend them off often times felt like multiple times per day in the summer -- always coming to me with some pyramid scheme, MLM pitch, or simply hounding me to buy garbage I didn't want. Naturally, those homeowners that came before you petitioned their local governments to do something about it, and so now maybe we have overcorrected some and it's time to bring it back to balance.

I was alive in the 90s. What you describe did not happen anywhere that anyone ever heard of.

I was also alive in the 90s, and can confirm it did.

It, in fact, still happens today in places where permit laws are not required or not enforced.

I grew up in he 90s and I can confirm OPs story. I can also confirm we just let dogs outside without watching them or even putting them on a leash.

> I can also confirm we just let dogs outside without watching them or even on putting a leash.

As a bicyclist in the 90s... yeah, I remember that. It kinda sucked.

They even made a video game about you where you had to deliver newspapers while avoiding being attacked by unleashed dogs. Remember Paperboy? :)

Way too early for me :-).

That came out in 1985...

Yeah, so? The point still stands. In any case, the most widely played version was the NES version which was released in 1989. That's close enough to the 90's to not make a marked difference in the point.

Yeah. So, if this happened in the 90's, it can't have inspired the video game. If it also happened earlier, it could have inspired the video game, but it is irrelevant that a later version was more widely played...

In case it isn't clear: This was absolutely a problem for cyclists before the 90s, too.

So was I, and it didn't happen where I lived. Sure, an occasional door-to-door salesman or Jehovah's Witness would show up, but nothing over-the-top.

I can't speak to the street vendor laws, but I can say in general, laws usually have a bit of wiggle room, which is the very reason things go to a judge or county clerks office. Law enforcement usually have enough wiggle room to allow for common sense and good human decency to fit in.

When people see these things happening, it usually just takes reminding city hall and the police chief that the laws are flexible so that they can avoid having their tax payers and constituents despise them.

So where you alive, as an adult, in the 90's or just warped opinion of the 90's based on what you were told.

I do not remember these hoards of MLM people....

Further the internet is likely the larger cause of any drop in this type of door to door selling than the laws that prevent kids from having a stand to sell flavored sugar water.

A hoard is a stash of valuable goods, and a horde is an invading group. It's easy to confuse them, don't worry.

> 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 recently had some kids come to my house and sell some crap I didn’t want, but I bought enough anyway so that each kid got a little change from it, to encourage them and hopefully nurture their entrepreneurial spark.

I’d happily do this more often but it’s rare to see stuff like that around here.

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).

I like the spirit. But oh my do food vendors have a perfect front for cooking the books and never making 30k.

But they can do that anyway, even if they have all the licenses and other folderol.

>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.

$4/hour isn’t going to be sustainable even if there are no barriers to entry. If it paid properly the barriers could be overcome. There’s a small range of pay where it works only if the barriers are gone, but let’s aim above that range.

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.

Regulations exist mainly for protection of establish businesses to prevent new entry and limit competition, not for safety or taxes even really. This is especially true when talking about zoning, building and health codes which are largely designed to make it very very expensive to start new business to limit competition

See Institute for Justice on going lawsuits on behalf of Food Trucks in many cities. It has nothing to do with Public Health, and everything to do with protectionism

> But what it should be is a lesson for cities to adopt a young entrepreneur license for like $10/year.

What happens when the lemonade stand with a $10 licence poisons people? https://foodsafetyinfosheets.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/6-1...

Death from norovirus is rare, but it does happen.

https://www.cdc.gov/features/norovirus/index.html

> CDC estimates that each year in the United States norovirus causes 19 to 21 million illnesses, 56,000 to 71,000 hospitalizations, and 570 to 800 deaths.

What happens when a lemonade stand with a $300 license poisons people? What distinction are you trying to draw here?

The lemonade stand with a $300 license is inspected several times a year and awarded a health score, and the employees are required to undergo food safety training. They are also running a real business that required a real investment, so they should be more risk averse.

I don't know if the risks from kids running lemonade stands is high enough to justify regulation, but presumably all the above makes a business with a $300 license less likely to poison customers.

you're buying powdered lemonade from kids. If you can't identify the risks involved in such a process, maybe you shouldn't be doing other things in everyday life like driving...

I mean, there's a significant amount of the population that isn't capable of passing a driving test but that we as a society still let buy food on their own.

We usually let them drive, too :-(.

and they seem to get through life without debilitating food poisoning, so maybe worrying about food poisoning via a child's powdered lemonade stand is a bit excessive.

Well, they get through life without debilitating food poisoning in large part because of existing government regulation regarding selling food....

> ... so they should be more risk averse.

It lessens risk, but doesn't eliminate it, so the original question still stands: what does happen when the $300 license holder poisons someone?

The victim sues and gets a pay out for their losses from the food vendor's public liability insurance that is a requirement of the licence.

Requiring liability insurance is entirely orthogonal to the cost of the business license. A locality could hand out business licenses for free and require liability insurance.

You seem to be forgetting the whole point of this thread--a proposal for $10 licenses that kids can afford.

There's no point in making a license affordable for kids if they still need to have completely unaffordable liability insurance.

It's pretty clear that when the OP suggested a $10 license they were also suggesting removing other regulatory costs. The proposal is useless otherwise.

The distinction is not cost. People preparing food for public consumption should have their facilities inspected and receive proper training on safe food handling and storage.

Nah. I'm perfectly content to eat in my friend's uninspected home, or judge random street vendors by sight and/or yelp.

I suggest you travel more broadly. I'm guessing you've never been to a part of the world with a vibrant street vendor scene, because once you have, you weep over the sad sterile* world we've legislated here in the US.

* Excepting the mass salmonella poisonings we get from large-scale mechanized food preparation.

Africa and SE Asia have a massive problem with food-borne illnesses and deaths related to it. You can take a look at the WHO's numbers, as they track food-related illness around the world [1].

Results start on page 61 and are broken down by region. They report impact of food-related illness in terms of years of life lost. America, Canada, W. Europe, and Australia are in the range of ~10 years lost per 100k people to food related illness. Africa is around 1200 per 100k and SE Asia is at 800 per 100k.

http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/199350/97892...

So maybe America is a "sad, sterile" world, but it's also legislated away something that remains a major problem in plaguing the rest of the world.

Maybe I'm misreading this, but page 78 seems to be the money shot and it's 35 for the US, 40-50 depending on what part of Europe you're in, and 140 for Mexico - which I consider to be the gold standard for street food.

There's also a huge problem inferring that health inspections and street vendor licensing have anything to do with the results. Mexico is probably no different from Thailand in this regard, and yet there's a 10X difference in years lost. I'll bet there are stronger correlative factors of climate (tropical = more parasites and diseases) and quality of public drinking water. Rich northern countries score better than equatorial countries on these benchmarks too.

It's quite a stretch to say that folks are going to start dying left and right if the health board takes a day off. I'd be perfectly happy to live with the health inspection regime (and the rich food culture) of Mexico, especially if it's combined with our public water and sanitation system.

The biz license doesn't include training.

It could pay for inspections and/or enforcement of employees' food-handler certification, which is sort of a reasonable point, but lemonade is an extremely low-risk food.

It feels weird to have a regulation that does nothing.

If you're going to regulate do it well, but also proportionately.

If you're not going to regulate don't regulate, but provide some education.

There's no point in providing toy registrations.

A $300 license for a one- or two-time pop-up lemonade stand hardly feels proportionate.

I think that most people know that little kids are disgusting and covered in germs and viruses. People buy the lemonade because they want to support the kid, not because of the quality of the beverage.

Last summer I noticed several of the lemonade stands in my neighborhood had bottles of hand sanitizer and that the kids were actually using it. Maybe there is some level of awareness out there.

At least little kids will usually wash their hands because their parents tell them to. High school cheerleaders with no oversight are a different story.

You have the same problem with people having parties and accidentally poisoning their guests.

At most, you can have a proviso in the license that they have to display a notice that the stand is not inspected or regulated by the health department.

>>But what it should be is a lesson for cities to adopt a young entrepreneur license for like $10/year.

why even $10/yr, why should they even need to ask or notify the government at all?

The solution is to repeal the laws that makes these things illegal in the first place

This. It shouldn't be too hard to carve out some exception that covers 99.999% of toy businesses run by kids.

Normal people doing normal people things shouldn't have to ask the government for permission.

The problem is we have shifted from a society there the government needs to provide a valid, and direct rational public safety reason to make regulations, to one where everything is defacto illegal unless it is explicitly authorized, permitted, and approved by government.

that is not a free society, even though most people consider it to be

Uh, no, we haven't.

Running a business is a thing that's been debated and found to be something that on the whole should be at least lightly regulated. Businesses that sell goods intended for human consumption are additionally regulated by health codes, for good reason. The fact that a proprietor is a kid is irrelevant to the reasons behind why those codes were enacted in the first place.

You can go create a business right now online that sells widgets or services or something without a permit, provided you pay your taxes due on it. The IRS even has a classification for self-employment for that express purpose. If you are selling something that is covered by some other regulation, you'll need to comply with those, but those regulations were also debated and enacted at some point because it was deemed necessary by the legislative body that enacted them. Whether you agree with that body is another issue, but it doesn't amount to "everything is defacto (sic) illegal unless it is explicitly authorized, permitted, and approved by government."

You have a very rose colored, and academic view of government which completely different from of how regulations work and are passed in the actual real world

Which point precisely do you disagree with and how do you support that view? Simply saying somebody is wrong is easy.

All of it, the idea that we "debate then pass" Regulations have been proven to be false by more than a few studies where by it has been shown the public opinion has almost no impact on what laws and regulations actually get passed or not.

The idea that we had some kind of philosophical debate and from that we choose that business should "lightly" regulated as no connection to reality or how business regulations actually came about in history nor would I classify today's business regulations as "light"

I also disagree that there are "good reasons" behind the health codes when large part of them are passed not for health reasons but for Protectionist reasons to keep out new entrants into the market (see my comments on Food Trucks as an example of this)

One would have to be a ardent supporter of Authoritarianism to believe that we have anything remotely approaching freedom in modern society, that goes for any nation. yes some nations are more oppressive than others, and places like the EU and the USA may be among the most free nations when compared to the others, but that does not make them "Free", just means they are less oppressive.

What people identify as freedom today is not freedom at all

Business licenses for even mundane things have been around for well over a hundred years, particularly in cities. So generic complaints about over-regulation have little historical resonance. Not only did those debates happen, as you say; they happened a very long time ago.

But a child's lemonade stand, AFAIK, never required a business license. That's new. I don't know if laws, enforcement practices, or public awareness have changed, but I don't get why people insist on defending it.

My guess is that enforcement has changed, and that's partly because of the push to take discretion (de jure and de facto) away from agencies to minimize prejudiced, unequal enforcement of the law. One of the takeaways is that, because the laws were always more strictly enforced against disfavored classes, the privileged are finally getting a taste of the mundane, prosaic injustices minorities have always faced. That doesn't excuse the injustices, but it hints at why it may be difficult to address them--permitting a white kid to sell lemonade at the end of his driveway also permits a black kid to sell Coca-Cola on the street corner, which might cause consternation among some people (think of recent SF ordinances taxing soda).

What's probably more accurate to say is that a child's lemonade stand always required the same license, but the law was never enforced (as you point out the enforcement disparity that has always existed.)

> 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.

Hah. There are hundreds, probably thousands of these all over northwest Seattle. They're called "little free libraries" or something. I don't really see the appeal and have only seen one family checking out the contents of a little library (ever). But as things go, it's harmless.

I dropped off a few books this weekend to one, and when I went by a couple hours later 2 out of the 3 were gone. So at least someone is using them!

It isnt the jerks who call the cops. It's the jerk cops who listen to them. Like street hockey, this is an area for police discretion, a chance for them to deal with dangerous situations but generally take a hands off approach. That cops abuse that small trust is 100% on them. Want to stop them? Have the mayor give them an award for thier dedicated service ridding the streets of children running lemonade stands. Nobody wants to see that when they google themselves.

I walk past a bookshare box on my way to work. Ill post a pic in a coupls hours.

Maybe that could cause the cop to lose his job and pension. With the growing lack of reason and consistency in Western society, almost nothing would surprise me anymore.

To do that you need them to break rules. The rules say no lemonade stands. So any sanction needs to come throught public shaming, not anything they could take to a tribunal.

I am a strong supporter of public shaming, in some cases it's almost become our last hope.

Shame on you destroying other people's lives!

Ha-ha only serious: public shaming, also known as "bullying" in the age of the internet is a growing problem, and is turned to in more and more cases, from the trivial to the non-politically correct.

Public shaming in a village context allowed for the possibility of a reboot by moving to the next village.

Where's the next village in the age of the internet?

Have you ever heard of a cop losing his job and pension in the US? It happens, but extremely rarely, and requires a bit more than this. Police unions are strong and protect even poorly-behaved members.

> Have the mayor give them an award for thier dedicated service ridding the streets of children running lemonade stands.

It's just as likely that someone with the mayor's ear has complained and caused him to lean on the cops.

Yep, I always buy the lemonade. I usually surreptitiously dump it out after I've gotten out of sight, but I buy it. :-)

Should young entrepreneurs be exempt from health code too?

It's pretty fucking rare for lemonade stands to be shut down due to lack of a "business license".

They're shut down due to health non-compliance. Whether those health restrictions are too strict or lax has very little to do with the age of the person in or out of compliance.

...An interesting question, but I'm leaning towards "yes."

1. Our immune systems are pretty good. Much better than is generally appreciated.

2. People usually buy lemonade from lemonade stands to support the kids, not for the taste.

Do you have any sources for what you're saying?

I have read dozens of examples of lemonade stands being shut down because of the lack of a business license.

I have not read any mentioning health code non-compliance.

FWIW - you put water and powder in a large cup with ice cubes, then pour it into smaller cups. Not sure you need a 60 minute health inspection for something like that.

You could probably inspect a kid's lemonade stand while standing in one spot. You could have volunteers in red berets do the inspection. I assume there are hygienic ways to dispense Country Time Lemonade and other ways. The differences might not be obvious to an amateur. But we're not talking about dairy or meat or eggs. Country Time should also diagram a model lemonade stand that is simple to set up and safe when operated properly.

You could, put it's not the way the health department works - I've owned a number of businesses that require a health inspection both at setup and randomly. Takes hours each time with lots of paperwork.

In my town, "concession stands" are exempt from restaurant health codes. Probably that way in many places.

We have rules in place for a reason, so we can live in a civil society.

Also, in this case, so people don't get sick from drinking contaminated beverages.

There are safe places to have a business located, and on the corner of a neighborhood street where bad drivers are cutting corners, texting, and going too fast is NOT one of those places.

Sure - there were the "good old days" - but thankfully humans have the ability to learn as time goes on, and to determine what is safe and what is not.

HOA idiot? Those idiots chose to live in the neighborhood they live in and pay those huge HOA fees for a reason - so that they can make sure neighbors abide by rules even if there are many rules they don't like themselves. It creates a status quo so everyone can live in peace.

My HOA keeps trash cans off streets, RVs from staying parked in front of our houses, junk from being in the front yard, dogs from barking constantly, etc. I've been fined for leaving my trash can out too long. Fine, but I won't do it again. It's also stopping my neighbor from letting his kids drive their ATV on the sidewalks and on our driveways and through our yards.

The lemonade stand is a thing of the past because it's just not safe, not a good idea, not a registered business, not policed by the FDA.

I get it. I'm such a stick in the mud. But I also think that rules need to stay in place and be enforceable in order to have a civil and safe world for humans to continue to enjoy.

Do you find that the world has gotten more civil in the time interval since lemonade stands started getting banned?

I have no idea in regards to lemonade stands. But I do think that rules and laws have made for a more civil society, it's just a matter of keeping up with change that's become a problem. More guns, more violence, more media, more tech, more vehicles, more densely populated areas, less law enforcement for the number of people, etc, and so on. We just can't keep up, and if we start dropping rules for the little stuff, that will begin to catch up with us too.

We had someone run a lemonade stand in the neighborhood for a couple weeks last year with a sign that said all proceeds were going to support a certain "charity". There was absolutely no oversight to see if that was happening or not, or if it was just a ruse. They sat on the busiest corner. Cars couldn't safely get through. Hearsay has it that they DID shut it down - I'm not sure if it was the HOA or police in this situation though.

> There are safe places to have a business located, and on the corner of a neighborhood street where bad drivers are cutting corners, texting, and going too fast is NOT one of those places.

As a parent, this is something that I care deeply about. If this is a consistent issue in your neighborhood, I strongly encourage you to contact your local police department. This type of driving in a residential area is significantly more dangerous to the community than a lemonade stand could ever possibly be.

We have local police perched around our neighborhood probably once or twice a week. In our little niche of the USA it's almost like nobody cares. Cops seem to just hand out some warnings or flash their lights. I've even called police about issues and they've told me over the phone, exactly this: "well, this IS North Idaho." It's incredibly irritating.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com