225 Selling From Your Truck: The Underground History of Amercian Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

225 Selling From Your Truck: The Underground History of Amercian Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

Selling From Your Truck 

    In the northeast corner of an island a long way from here, a woman sells plates of cooked  shrimp and rice from out of an old white truck. Her truck is worth $5, 000 at most. She  sells only that one thing plus hot dogs for the kids and canned soda. The license to do this  costs $500 a year, or $43.25 a month, a

little over a dollar a day. The shrimp lady is fifty-  nine years old. She has a high school diploma and a nice smile. Her truck parks on a  gravel pull-off from the main highway in a nondescript location. No one else is around,  not because the shrimp lady has a protected location but because no one else wants to be  there. A hand-lettered sign advertises, "$9.95 Shrimp and Rice. Soda $1.00. Hot Dogs  $1.25." 

      The day I stood in line for a shrimp plate, five customers were in front of me. They bought  fourteen plates among them and fourteen sodas. I bought two and two when it came my  turn, and by that time five new customers had arrived behind me. I was intrigued.  

     The next day Janet and I returned. We parked across the road where we could watch the  truck but not make the shrimp lady nervous. In two hours, forty-one plates and forty-one  sodas were handed out of the old truck, and maybe ten hot dogs. A week later we came  back and watched again as nearly the same thing happened. Janet, a graduate of the  Culinary Institute of America, estimated that $7 of the $10.95 for shrimp and soda was  profit, after all costs.   

      Later we chatted with the lady in a quiet moment. The truck sits there eight hours a day,  seven days a week, 364 days a year (the island is warm year round). It averages 100 to  150 shrimp sales a day, but has sold as many as 300. When the owner-proprietress isn 't  there, one of her three daughters takes over. Each is only a high school graduate. For all  I know, the only thing saleable any of them knows how to do is cook shrimp and rice, but  they do that very well. The family earns in excess of a quarter million dollars a year  selling shrimp plates out of an old truck. They have no interest in expanding or  franchising the business. Another thing I noticed: all the customers seemed pleased;  many were friendly and joked with the lady, myself included. She looked happy to be  alive.