The Money Maker

During my time at school, the rules inside of both school and boarding )I was a boarder) changed and I noticed a "gap in the market" so to speak that 
enabled me to make the most money that I have made in a long while.

While I was at boarding, the only way to get confectionary was to bring it in from home, or to buy them on one of your limited "town" visits. As those who were younger than myself did not have the opportunity to go into town very often, along with this privilige being one of the first to be removed upon the first bout of bad behaviour left a seriously large demand for confectionary and a very limited supply. I decided with the help of those in teh dorm that I shared to go into business.

As we were a little older than the rest, our ability to go into town was not really dependedent on our behaviour. This was excellent as it allowed us to do regular stockups. It all started at first when on of my dormmates who's dad worked at Cadbury's brought us some entire boxes of chocolate to share. We didn't manage to eat them all, so we decided to sell them off to those in the dorms around us, cheap. Within about ten minutes they were all gone!

This sparked the scheme that I followed through on next; obviously it involved confectionary.
It started as our boarding house master had a crackdown on rule breakers which resulted in town visiting privileges being revoked. This meant that there was no way for the rest of th boarding house to get confectionary.
We took advantage of this (me and my room mates) and bought biscuits, crisps, cans of fizzy drinks chocolate and sold it for a profit. Some items made us a lot of money others did not.

Our highest earning item was Maryland Cookies which were bought for £1 for 3 packets and sold for £1 per packet. Giving a nice margin, even on top of the retail outlet margins! We continued to do this for a month, and made a fair amount of money. 
We also expanded our sales into the main school site, as none of the younger kids at the main school site were allowed to leave it was a perfect opportunity to capitalize on a captive audience.

Then I thought: the school canteen used to stock confectionery, and it's run by a separate company that is unconnected with the school. Because of this I decided to try and order stuff through them. It worked, but I had to have the exact quantities and cash upfront which a bit annoying however it did allow us to increase our product range to include things like J2O which were quite expensive to source from elsewhere. It also meant that we could get regular shipments of specific things, like types of chocolate.


Over the time that we did this, we earned approximately £300 in profit. Which for a school kid was quite a lot! I was quite please with this as a result, and as we managed to take advantage of a high demand situation, and a captive market. This was a key lesson because it made selling easy, all we had to do was list what we had in our cupboards and if it wasn't there, when we were going shopping! It was really easy, and so successful that the house master tried to replicate our success.

Until next week,

Thanks for reading!