Living the Dream

This past summer a very good friend of mine Josh and I decided to start a new business. We were going to make it "big" selling hot dogs. Sadly we were wrong. It only took 3 months for our little venture to make us both flat broke. Being an on again off again entrepreneur for most of my life, I truly did believe that selling hot dogs on a corner in downtown Denver Colorado was a wonderful plan for making a great living. I read articles in magazines and online that said it was a "recession proof" business. The words "turn key" and "low risk" kept coming up over and over again. So, I took my retirement savings and Josh took his, and after a few days of looking around on the internet, we chose the cart we liked, and drove for 24 hours to get our bright shiny new cart. It was awesome and so full of promise. We drove, chatted, dreamed, and laughed just thinking about all the possibility that lay before us. We just knew this was going to be a wonderful experience for years to come, and that we were going to pass the business on to our children. We believed that we were about to become the proud owners of "The American Dream".

Both Josh and I are generation Xers, he was born in March 1974 and I was born in February 1974, we were believers, dreamers, and it was very easy to convince us that we were going to be the proud owners of a dream that was going to work. After several attempts at events that should have brought us hundreds each in profit, and many days of our perfect downtown corner just doing nothing, we realized that it just was not going to work. At this point we realized that we were both spending all of our own personal money trying to force it to work out. We sadly just put the cart back into storage, and decided that in spring we would try again to make it happen. Deep down, I konw that it is not going to work. There is no longer any need for a couple of dreamers with a hot dog cart. Those days have gone with the fast food dollar menu.

Once upon a time, kids and parents went to fairs and festivals and bought things like hot dogs, funnel cakes, cotton candy, and snow cones. It had nothing to do with the food or the cost. It was about the feeling, about the smell, the atmosphere all the things that summer and youth are made of. Oh they will take their kids to Disneyworld and pay $25 for a hamburger but the county fair is no longer on most parent's radar. We are in a time in our country that is very depressing to me. I discovered a month or so back that the Michigan State Fair was canceled, not for this year and next, but indefinitely. That's right kiddies, as far as the promoters can tell, forever. What can be MORE American than checking out an American made Mustang with a hot dog in your hand, at the Michigan State Fair...................it's gone this dream of ours, and I sure do hope NOT forever.