The Year Money Grew on Trees - Aaron Hawkins [62]
"Twenty!" replied Jennifer.
"The price made a big difference," said Lisa. "We also started letting people taste an apple and that seemed to convince most of them."
"Yeah, that's a good idea," I said, thinking of how sweet they were. "They'll sell themselves. Did anyone care that they aren't in apple boxes?"
"They asked why they weren't, but I don't think it stopped anyone from buying," she replied.
"I hope you didn't tell anyone we got them from the dump," said Amy.
"I just said they came from some other fruit growers," said Lisa.
"If you sell that many every night, we should be done in how long?" asked Amy.
Lisa's eyes drifted up toward the sky as she calculated. "About fifty days."
"How many weeks?" asked Amy.
"Eight if you don't count Sundays," said Lisa.
Amy looked at me the way my mom usually looked at my dad when he forgot their anniversary.
"I'll bet we'll sell a lot more on Saturdays," I said, trying to sound positive. I really hoped we would. The clock in my head was beginning to tick too fast. Eight weeks was too long. According to Brother Brown, we maybe had five weeks before the apples were overripe and no one wanted them.
We pushed the unsold boxes into the station wagon and walked home together. After a hundred feet, Lisa said, "Oh, yeah!" and ran back. She returned carrying a glass jar with money in it. She held it up to show us.
"So is the jar part of your system?" I asked Lisa with a smile.
"Yeah, but just one part," she replied secretively.
Chapter 14
Double-Crossing Old Lady
We quickly discovered that with an $8 price, we could sell apples faster than we could pick them. I told Lisa to try $10 to see if we could get more dollars per box. She reported that sales slowed to a trickle and customers complained that they could buy them cheaper down the road. Years later I learned this had something to do with supply and demand and that people would go to college for four years to learn about it. We didn't know what to call it, but seemed to be stuck with $8 boxes. On Saturday we unloaded all that we had at that price by the early afternoon and moved our salesmen back to the orchard for picking.
Lisa liked to announce running totals every day for the number of boxes sold and dollars collected. She put our weekly total at $720. It was a lot of money for a bunch of kids who had never held a $20 bill before, and Michael knew enough math to let us know we could buy 2,880 candy bars with it. Still, we only had maybe six more weeks to sell, and I knew it wasn't enough per week to come close to $12,000, or even $8,000. In a way, the trees had grown money like Mrs. Nelson predicted. She was going to get it all, though, unless we could pick faster and get more apples out on the road.
That Saturday the new boxes from General Supply arrived on a flatbed truck that drove up to my house. Lisa, Jennifer, and Michael helped stack the new boxes, which were white with bright red lettering that said "New Mexico APPLES." The boxes looked so clean and crisp, they almost seemed too fancy after using the dump boxes. After covering them with plastic, we decided we would save them until all the others were gone.
The arrival of the boxes reminded me that even if we could fill and sell the thousand we started with, at $8 a box there wouldn't be enough money to even pay off Mrs. Nelson after clearing the General Supply bill. By then, I knew that each tree produced at least four boxes of apples, so there was enough in the orchard to fill at least twelve hundred boxes. On the way home from school the next Monday, I was deciding whether to place an order for two hundred more from General Supply when Lisa said, "It's too bad we don't have some smaller boxes too."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because a lot of people don't want a whole bushel box, and they ask for something smaller."
"Really? Like how many apples do they want?"
"Maybe a dozen. I guess like what you would put in one of those plastic bags that you use at the grocery store."
"Hmm. So do you think they would buy them in those