The Parable of the Hot Dog Vendor

The Parable of the Hot Dog Vendor

Author Unknown to Me

There was this hot dog vendor who sold hot dogs by the roadside.  He was illiterate, so he never read newspapers.  He was hard of hearing, so he never listened to the radio. His eyes were weak, so he never watched television.

But, enthusiastically, he sold lots of hot dogs. His sales and profit went up. He used only the finest wieners and the freshest buns.  People came from miles around to eat his hot dogs.  All day long, the hot dog vendor would sing beautiful songs and sell his hot dogs.

He ordered more meat and got himself a bigger and better stove.  As his business was growing, the son, who had recently graduated from college, joined his father.

Then something strange happened.  The son asked, "Dad, aren't you aware of the great recession that is coming our way?”  The hot dog vendor replied, "No, but tell me about it.”  The son said, "The international situation is terrible. The domestic condition is even worse.  We should be prepared for the coming bad time."

The hot dog vendor thought that since his son had been to college, read the papers, and listened to radio, he ought to know and that his advice was not to be taken lightly.  So, the next day, the hot dog vendor cut down his order for the meat and buns, took down the sign, and was no longer enthusiastic.

Business got worse and the hot dog vendor stopped singing.

Very often, he ran out of wieners and buns so his customers had nothing to buy when they stopped by his stand and had to take their business elsewhere.

Very soon, fewer and fewer people bothered to stop at his hotdog stand and his sales started coming down rapidly.  He again cut his orders, switched to lower quality wieners, and used cheaper buns.

Business dropped even still and he stopped being friendly with his customers and talked only about how bad business was with the few remaining customers he had, which reminded them of how bad things were and made them begin to think that they, too, should cut back on their spending.

Soon the hot dog vendor was ordering so few wieners and so few buns that he did not have anything to sell to the very few remaining customers he had, so he closed the hot dog stand.

The hot dog vendor said to his son, "Son, you were right.  We are in the middle of a recession.  I am glad you warned me ahead of time."

The Moral of The Story

Never engage in self-defeating patterns of behavior. If you think that you will fail, or always only expect the negative or worst, nothing in this world can save you.

The preceding story was posted on the wall at my family’s Western Auto Store in Iva, South Carolina. 

Visit My Child-Bride, Suzanne’s blog.

Watch this on YouTube

The Parable of the Hot Dog Vendor

The Parable of the Hot Dog Vendor

Author Unknown to Me

There was this hot dog vendor who sold hot dogs by the roadside.  He was illiterate, so he never read newspapers.  He was hard of hearing, so he never listened to the radio. His eyes were weak, so he never watched television.

But, enthusiastically, he sold lots of hot dogs. His sales and profit went up. He used only the finest wieners and the freshest buns.  People came from miles around to eat his hot dogs.  All day long, the hot dog vendor would sing beautiful songs and sell his hot dogs.

He ordered more meat and got himself a bigger and better stove.  As his business was growing, the son, who had recently graduated from college, joined his father.

Then something strange happened.  The son asked, "Dad, aren't you aware of the great recession that is coming our way?”  The hot dog vendor replied, "No, but tell me about it.”  The son said, "The international situation is terrible. The domestic condition is even worse.  We should be prepared for the coming bad time."

The hot dog vendor thought that since his son had been to college, read the papers, and listened to radio, he ought to know and that his advice was not to be taken lightly.  So, the next day, the hot dog vendor cut down his order for the meat and buns, took down the sign, and was no longer enthusiastic.

Business got worse and the hot dog vendor stopped singing.

Very often, he ran out of wieners and buns so his customers had nothing to buy when they stopped by his stand and had to take their business elsewhere.

Very soon, fewer and fewer people bothered to stop at his hotdog stand and his sales started coming down rapidly.  He again cut his orders, switched to lower quality wieners, and used cheaper buns.

Business dropped even still and he stopped being friendly with his customers and talked only about how bad business was with the few remaining customers he had, which reminded them of how bad things were and made them begin to think that they, too, should cut back on their spending.

Soon the hot dog vendor was ordering so few wieners and so few buns that he did not have anything to sell to the very few remaining customers he had, so he closed the hot dog stand.

The hot dog vendor said to his son, "Son, you were right.  We are in the middle of a recession.  I am glad you warned me ahead of time."

The Moral of The Story

Never engage in self-defeating patterns of behavior. If you think that you will fail, or always only expect the negative or worst, nothing in this world can save you.

The preceding story was posted on the wall at my family’s Western Auto Store in Iva, South Carolina. 

Visit My Child-Bride, Suzanne’s blog.

Watch this on YouTube

Disclaimer
The opinions or advice listed in this blog or website should be used as a place to start only. It is not a substitute for the use of a professional.
Please be sure to consult your attorney and/or accountant with any specific questions.
There is no one right answer to any business question that will cover all circumstances.

Get out the vote?

It is the first of the year. This year promises to be a big year. First of all, it is a leap year. Second, it is an election year.

When elections come around I hear all the talk from politicians and I am reminded of my father. Some have said, “Bruce was a republican.” They thought this because he was a die-hard Ronald Reagan fan, as am I.

My father did vote for Reagan and Strom Thurmond (a distant cousin of mine). However, he also voted for Jimmy Carter and Butler Derrick. Both of them were democrats.

 I asked my father about this seeming bit of confusion. He explained, “Son, you vote for the man, not the party.” He went on to say that a person who votes a party line does so because they are letting the party do the thinking for them. This makes sense.

We have some interesting choices this year. We have several different Republican candidates, none of which seems to stand out from the others. We also have Obama. I was opposed to Obama as president because he did not have the experience needed to run the country.

He has surrounded himself with some very smart economists. His top advisors include people like Paul Volker, the former Fed Chairman who broke inflation in the 1970s. Still, our economy is just inches from a depression. The only reason this is a recession instead of a depression is that we don’t have prices going down. Every other indicator would show it to be a depression. We are in the worst economy since the Great Depression.

I could not tell you who to vote for. As of yet, I am undecided. What I do know is that we need to pray for our elected officials. We need to ask God to grant them all wisdom.

For Obama we need to pray he listens to his economic advisors. We need to pray the economic advisors remember the lessons of the past. In the past, we learned that Adam Smith’s “unseen hand” determined how the economy worked. For now, we have an economy that has been monkeyed with for so long the “Unseen Hand’ can’t work properly.


First of all, we need to look back at what has worked in the past. After the Great Depression we put laws in place so that banks could not be stock brokers, insurance companies could not be banks, etc. Then, we monkeyed around with all of that and relaxed those laws. We need to put them back.


We need to get government out of business. We need less regulation of the business industry (except the financial industry) and let business do business. Yes, we will have some greedy people get rich and take advantage of the economy. You know what, we will always have people trying to game the system.


If we went to a strictly cash-based system of accounting we could eliminate some shenanigans. If a sale isn’t a sale until the money is received, we wouldn’t have any manipulation of revenue. Assets are valued only at what they could actually sell for on the open market. There should be no mark to make believe concept.


Supply-side economics does work. History proves that. The reason we get into such problems in the economy when we use supply-side economics is it works too good. People get stupid.


Guess what? There is an old saying, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” That saying is correct. We saw it with the dot com bubble and the housing bubble and Enron. People see a stock taking off and they know that sooner or later there has to be a fall. They think they are smart enough to pull out just in time. Very few people are able to restrain themselves when they think they have a little more time before they have to pull out.


So, what do you think the next bubble will be? How long do you think it will be before the economy turns up again? Comment here and let us know.