Supply and Demand

The girls appended that warning to a poster advertising their lemonade stand today.

We ate our dinner on the veranda at noon because it was such a lovely day.  I said, "This is ideal lemonade stand weather."  The meal continued and then concluded, and I left to attend a meeting and run errands.  When I returned for supper, the girls let me know that, after I left, they had taken my statement and run with it.

They made a sign (see above) to advertise their lemonade stand.  The found a recipe (from a past issue of Food Network Magazine) for homemade lemonade and followed it, boiling and cooling a simple syrup and adding freshly squeezed lemon juice.  They gathered lawn chairs and a table and hauled them to the street at the north end of our block, thinking that it would have plenty of traffic/potential customers.  In no time, they were selling their lemonade for $0.50 per cup to employees of the school across the street, to pedestrians passing by, and to thirsty drivers who pulled over for a beverage.  Most people paid with dollar bills and told the girls to keep the change.  The pitcher was soon empty, and the girls were $12 richer.

We had just enough lemons on hand to make one pitcher (thus the "Supply is limited" warning).  I wonder how long the girls could have kept their lemonade stand in operation had they planned in advance, bought a bunch of lemons at the grocery store, stationed one girl in the kitchen at home to keep making lemonade, and assigned one girl to be the runner (of full pitchers to the stand and empty pitchers fro).  In any case, they had a higher profit than their last lemonade stand three years ago (remember?).

Hillary had supper at the house of her friends, who live on the east side of the park to the west of which we live.  We went for an evening walk, stopping at that house along the way to pick up Hillary, and this is a view of the walking path we took through the park.  Pretty!