On this episode of Laptop or Bust, we find out how much we can make by picking
and selling organic blueberries. So, choosing a berry farm, there's really
only a few factors that you need to bear in mind. Quality of the berries, whether
they allow you pick, if there's some kind of a gimmick. For example, NS, the
berry farm that we're at today, has organic blueberries. So, we can put
organic on our signs. And finally, pricing is of course going to be a major
factor if you are planning to resell them and try and make a profit. Other
than that, in terms of supplies, we've got our own boxes because most upix will
allow you to buy carriers for your berries, but they're going to be more
expensive. We've got some tape to make our boxes not have holes in them. some
sunscreen and some nitrial gloves so that we're not putting our grubby
fingers that we put up our butts all over the berries before we I don't think
that's a thing. Why are you putting your finger up your butt? How do you How else
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so I wanted to take boxes out into the field. Not a thing, apparently. Buckets.
Got it. They're useful for more than just ice cream. Off we
go. Okay. Well, that's about an hour of picking then. How'd you do? Uh.
Oh, that's actually really close. Pretty similar. All right. I don't know. I
think you beat me by a little bit. Yours looks a little bit more filled in. Yeah, but my corners are empty. Let's see.
Let's see. There's only one way to know for sure. Let's go. Yes, they do. Yep.
You bet. Wow. Not bad. 22 lb. So, 19 minus three
for the box. So, 19 lb. 19 lb. All right. I'm guessing yours is 25.
No way. 23.2. I won by 1.2 lb. That's I
knew it was closer than you thought it was. Okay. So, I got 20 20.2 lb. So, we
got 39 lb between the two of us with an
hour of picking. So, if we were here, and that
includes the the inefficiencies of us
just starting to learn and all that kind of stuff cuz we're both going faster near the end. 39 lb. So, if we were here
for 4 hours, we should end up with somewhere in the neighborhood of about
160 lbs. And if you started with like a
full day of picking, got a whole bunch of stock, and then just did like 4 hours
every day after that or something with half selling, then you could optimize
how much you need to pick versus how much you know you can sell. Very
interesting. Okay. Well, let's take our hall and let's uh let's go sell it.
Cool. So, while we built our model around us picking the berries at the
beginning of the day and then going and selling them, there are some other options here. In fact, when some of my
family members found out that I was going to a berry farm today, they said,
"Oh, hey, can you get £10 for me,£10 for me, and I found myself picking up
actually a lot more berries than I needed to sell at the side of the road today." So canvasing your neighborhood
for pre-orders might be an interesting way to A never have any overstock even
though your margins are lower and B not even necessarily have to pick because as
long as you can book orders at a price that's higher than what you pay for the
prepicked ones. In our case it's two bucks per pound if we pick them or 250
per pound if we just buy them already picked then you're still making money
either way. I got to say, one of the coolest things about this has been
learning about jobs that never would
have even occurred to me if I wasn't sitting in a boardroom going like, "What
are odd jobs you could do?" Like, if you needed to make some cash in the summer,
I like it. So, what we're working on right now is how to sell the 100
freaking pounds of blueberries that we
have to get rid of in the next about 3 to 4 hours. So, we're going to create
ourselves some uh some signage and let's
see who can make the best most eye-catching sign. I brought these.
Are you going to put them on a sign? No, I'm going to put them on my feet. So, I'm like tie dyed and pink and we'll be
like, "Okay." Yeah. Sorry. Okay, let's
do it. All right. What? We only have markers. Uh oh. We
can have anything we want. Where's all the other stuff? Well, I don't know
where we keep it. We have markers for now.
Okay. I like your uh I like your thinking with the uh doubling up on the
on the sign.
life. It looks like a mask. Like a carnival mask. Look at
that. Attempt two for a
bee. It just looks like a different type of
crap. It doesn't look that
bad. There's just a a butt and a mask
and then other letters. Well, that sucked a lot. Okay.
Well, listen up. Here's the story about
a little guy that lives in the blueberry
world. I am running out of
ink. So, I uh had kind of a panic moment
when I realized I didn't really think about what direction my arrow was going
to point. And I think it's okay because if I stand kind of that direction from
the thing and I go like this, then we're good. As long as you're pointing towards
a driveway entrance, which I think there is one on each side. So, it doesn't
really Okay. All right. Well, then in that case, we're good. Let's go.
Actually, I'm going to get a clown wig. Yeah. Let's see if there's anything
else in the costume uh costume bin.
I think that guy looked at us. We just set up wherever. First things first, we
have a table. We borrowed this from our neighbor. It'll be helpful. You can put
berries on it. You can put your bags on it. You can do whatever else there. And
then we have chairs because it's going to be a long day. A canopy for shade is
going to be a huge plus if you're going to be out there for hours at a time.
Protection for both you and your uh
berries. That's a tree. Uh that's okay. I think you can kind of you can kind of
scooch probably around it a little. One cannot raise the roof until one has a
roof. So there's velcro on the post.
We've got bags cuz we want to sell them in bags, not little tray things cuz the
tray things cost more. We have little tray things to display
the berries so that our table looks nice. We have cool little chalky sign
boards to be like, "Ah, 2 lb cost this
much or whatever else." We have a digital kitchen
scale for weighing out our pounds of berries.
Vinyl gloves so we can look like we're being all hygienic and stuff.
What do you mean look like? We used gloves while we fixed them.
We have measuring spoons. I don't think we need those. Those were for the lemonade that we decided not to sell.
You could still Are you drinking it with your hand? Oh, I guess. Oh, and we have
a tablecloth. That's cute. A couple things we sort of forgot were a cash
box and uh some change because people
are unlikely to show up with exact change. So, so that's a thing. Okay. I
didn't want our blueberries to bake in the sun there. So, we've pulled them
into the shade, opening up the doors, making sure that they're not uh, you
know, going to be soft by the time we give them to anyone.
We We should still We should do 1.25 lbs is five bucks. If people really It's not
going to be 1.25 anymore. You just Yeah, it will be. No, no, you had done the math wrong. Um Oh, I did. Yeah, you're
right. I did 5. If they have exact change, they can buy however much they want. We don't care. And we can put it
in a bag then. So, I'm pre-making a few bags. So, I'm pre-making some bags. I'm
pre-making some 1.25 25 lb bags. We're going to have some one lb bags, but
those are going to be hidden somewhere else. So, the reason for that is we ran
into some pricing difficulties in that we don't have change. So, we have to
sell 1.25 lbs at $5 in order for us to
have any hope of giving people change to avoid a trip to the bank for a bunch of
quarters. Do you guys want some blueberries? Maybe. It's $3.99 a pound. It's $4.
$3.99 a pound. All right. So, here's what we have for
change. That's like, can you not put
money all over the merchandise? I am going to go put up the signs and uh
let's see if we can start bringing in some customers here. I don't know how
visible this is. Okay, so here we go. I'm going to go
be one of those dancing sign people. Never done that before. A lot of people
turn here. A lot of people turn and go up 184th
Street instead of going through on 60th Avenue. Maybe if I positioned myself a
little smarter, I could take advantage of people coming up here as
well. Oh no, they're honking at me. Wow,
I'm already humiliated and it's only been 3 minutes.
You know what's funny about uh this
episode is that because we have inventory, if we don't sell it, we're
actually just out like $300 of
berries. Not insignificant. We're getting
blueberries. You know you want them. People are reading the sign. I'm
definitely getting their attention. So, does one of the recurring
themes of these laptop or bus videos become Lionus failure
montages? Maybe I should have a price advertised. Maybe that's what I'm
missing cuz our pricing is competitive. But, uh, no one's ever actually getting
in there to look at it. There's a ghost cop car that's like parked on the street
there. Hopefully just doing cell phone checks, but he could be staring at
me. Oh, I saw them. They thought about it. Oh, I think I might have drawn one
in. So, that would be one in the first 6
minutes. No, they're just getting
gas. Are we really sitting at zero
customers for the first 10 minutes here? Oh, I thought I saw someone at the
table, but it was Ed. So freaking the guy who stopped for
Luke wanted 250 a pound. I mean we
brought them all the way
here called to say that the bumper is still around you. Yeah, I know. Okay. He
said that Ivonne called to say that the
cop is still around and apparently watching me. They pretend they can't see
me. I am the lowest of the low. Hello. They are technically not certified
organic. The farm that we picked them at said that they were organic. That's
whatever. This is five bucks.
So, we got our first sale. They were a little uh weird about the cameras, which
is probably expected, but yeah, that went pretty easy. I was happy we had the
pre-made bags because she said she would buy whatever, and it hap just so
happened that our pre-made bag was 1.25 lb. So, we got five bucks instead of
four bucks. So, that's good. I'm going to keep the 1.25 lb bags promptly
displayed. From talking to berry farms, people are
doing this. People are finding a way to buy the berries wholesale and sell them
at berry stands on the side of the
road. But the issue that I'm seeing is startup
cost. Establishing yourself as a known provider of berries is going to take a
significant amount of time. the place where you sell
them probably affects your success a lot. We're in kind of a farming
community here in Langley, so that guy expecting 250 a pound
pricing, there'll probably be a fair bit of that. But price doesn't seem like the
only or maybe even a major problem because we can't even get anyone to pull
over. Startup overhead includes a food service
license, a vendor license, as well as
some kind of an agreement with an establishment that will let you sell there. So, the Clover Hill Market was
nice enough to let us do this for one day, but I think if we were to try to do
it on an ongoing basis, we would either have to play our students saving up for
a laptop card pretty hard or we would have to compensate them in some
way, adding still higher margin
requirements to an already difficult business.
My turn. Yeah, your turn. Let's wait till this light turns red. I mean, I'd
say I'd say I have a deep concern about there not being anyone manning the booth
for all the customers right now, but uh it doesn't appear to be an
issue. I've shared any insight that I can think of as I go about why this
might not be working or things that we could do better. Feel free to do the
same.
Do you want the hat? You're covering it up to the side
anyway. I know, but to keep the sun off.
Oh, it's actually pretty nice.
Do you want the wig, too? No.
Sign tricks. What
up? Almost broke the arrow. Yeah. Go buy some
berries. When ghosts just be like, "Yay,
berries." Spin move. Reverse spin move.
Drop the sign. Raise the sign. Twirl the
sign. Twirl the sign. Other way. Flip it over. Twirl it around. Berries. Buy
someing berries. Do you want me to verify for you on the scale? Oh, no. I
Okay. I look honest with my shirt here. Honest.
There you are. And thank you, ma'am.
Pleasure doing business with you. What we're actually making is a video about
different ways that students can make money in the summer. So, we're not
students, but we're trying different business models for one day each and
then evaluating sort of how the numbers work out and making a a recommendation
based on that. So far, website or what? Um, YouTube uh YouTube.com/linustips.
Okay. The sort of theme. Anyway, sorry. Would you like some blueberries? I would
love some. Wonderful. So, it's four bucks a pound, which we found was about
$150 a pound cheaper than any of the supermarkets. Okay. And they are they're
not certified organic. That's yucky. But
they're from NS Farms in Kquitlam. And it is an organic farm. We know the
owner. All that's on the up and up. You'll take one. Wonderful. And I
actually do have change for you. Would you like me to validate? Okay. Oh, you
want you want£5? Okay. You will have to give me one moment. Uh, let me think for
a second. expecting that one. No, no, I wasn't. Um, but what I can do is I can
use our already counted. So, here, let's
just do a quick validation so that I know that I'm not ripping you off what
our weight is here. No, that's 5 lbs. You want Sorry, did you say how much you want? 5 lbs. Yeah. Good. Okay, then
that's what this is. And I will start to put that into bags for you. Oh, boy. How
about if I give you this first? Yes. And then I'll help you hold the bag. That would be wonderful. And we have more
bags than that if it comes to that. Uh,
Yeah, we um you know, we're we're trying our best to sort of model it in a way
that will be easy for people to replicate if it turns out to be
successful. So, we were thinking you can save some cost by using paper bags and
recycle the bags. It's all very friendly. So, we use reusable containers
to pick them, all that kind of stuff. So, we're just Perfect.
We're trying different things. We're not experts at this. That's kind of the point.
It's a middle-aged white. Oh, there's someone at this booth. Go, go quick.
Blueberries. Hello, sir.
Dang it. My sign is broken.
So, these are five bucks even, so they're easier for change, which is why we've done 125. Get to my sign. My
wonderful sign. Cool.
Awesome. Thank you very much. All right,
so we've divided them up into easier quantities. So one one uh 1.25 lbs is
five bucks. Okay.
Perfect. Thank you, sir. Thank you very much. Have a good day.
We just sit here and eat. Maybe you buy a bag. Then you can sit
here and eat from the bag. Let's buy some. Okay. Uh she said last as in me.
Oh, I see. It's the Royal Wii.
So, each one of those is 1.25 lbs. And
how much is that? That's five bucks. Five bucks? Yep.
See, she said it so loud because it was just such a great price. It's expensive.
Yeah.
You should get your taxi driver to get some blueberries. I would highly
recommend it. Although there is some added cost of the taxi. They're they're
pretty good value. Blueberries. They're
wonderful. They're blue. So, I tell you
what, we're actually packing it in for the day. Take another one. A Are you
sure? Yeah. Yeah. We won't be able to do anything with at least some of this
inventory. So, thank you very much. Yeah. Enjoy. Thank you.
You're welcome, Blueberry. Oh, no. Not you. See, seenor. Hey, you have any
penis whistle? Are you I'm the biggest fan. I trust me, I have much bigger fans
than you. You couldn't weigh more than like 75 lbs. Those are good berries. Uh
yeah, some of them. All right. This is about 11 12 lb. So, okay. Uh let's see.
Uh don't pes don't haggle with me. No.
Enjoy. They got money for you. I don't Oh, did you give it to them?
Oh, wow. I see how it is. All right. Well, that's only 20. Hey. Hey. Your
your kid learned from the best. That's Yeah, that's uh 20 pesos.
How much for the wig? The wig's not for sale, my friend. This has got my DNA on
it. You could make another Linus.
All right. Thanks, guys. Good night, you guys. So, an interesting thought we have
about our neighbor at the office, Steve, dropping by to buy a 10 lb flat of
berries off me, not to mention my two family members, each of which want 10
lbs of berries, is that taking
pre-orders and selling at a lower margin
but a higher volume to friends and family may be either a a way to get the
business kickarted or b just plain more
viable than the side of the road method via which We made very little over the
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link, that won't help. So, laptop or
bust? That is the question. And I think the only way to answer it is to show you
guys the spoils and the other spoils.
Yeah. Uh we have a lot of blueberries left and we kind of need to sell way
more than we actually did. The the spoils having cash in your hand isn't as
great as it originally sounds. Uh we would have had to sell at a rate of
what, like four or five the times the amount that we actually did. Yeah. In
order for us to make this feasible, we'd have had to sell a lot more blueberries.
Um, we have to account for the very high startup cost. I think there is a
potential model in here. If you can find enough people to pre-order from you,
like our neighbor Steve did, you would have to do a higher volume at a reduced
margin, which in a nutshell is the
produce business. Yeah. And like you need a car and you need it almost every
day, if not every two or three days. Uh, you have to have quite a bit of upfront
cost for the berries themselves. Yes. if you're picking it, but they're still not
that cheap and you have to buy them like every couple
days. So, could you make money like
this? The answer is yes. But laptop or
bust, I'm giving this one a thumbs down. Yeah, there's better things you could
do.