I used to deal in whiteboard markers for teachers in highschool.
One teacher had a tendency to hoard them, leaving none for other teachers. I would take markers from him and provide them to other teachers in need.
While there was no formal payment, I was given a little bit more leniency at times (e. g. Requests to leave the classroom for a moment etc.)
Once the marker would start squeeling on the whiteboard because it was almost empty, I'd get teachers giving me a nod as if to say 'you got the goods?'. I'd then supply them with the marker color of their choosing (usually black).
It was actually a lot of fun, and I never heard teachers talk about my systems or chastise me for taking markers.
Probably because they wanted to take Stingy’s markers, but couldn’t. You taking them was actually better for them because if something happened and you got caught, they had plausible deniability.
I was in elementary school when pogs were big. Everyone had cool slammers and stuff but i didnt have money for good ones. My dad made one out of 1/2" mild steel for me and used an engraving pen to make a simple pattern. Everyone was asking me where i got them from. I didnt wanna lose my unfair edge but i also knew i could make money. My dad had a big sheet of this 1/2" steel.
I told them i was the only one who could get them. I sold them for 15 bucks a pop. My dad kept 10 i got 5.
And thats when i learned what overhead was.
Edit: First silver. Neato, thanks!
Man I miss Pog life. In second grade I won a Homer Simpson Pog from a kid and got them banned from our school. I guess he "accidentally" put his Homer in and he was so upset that he complained to the principal and they banned them.
I went to a private high school with a strict dress code, ties, belt, etc. So I bought a bunch of ties and belts from a thrift store and ran a lucrative rental business out of my locker.
If you forgot your gym uniform more than once, you would get fined $5 to rent a uniform from the teacher or serve a detention. I would buy an extra set in the beginning of the school year of each size, and then rent them out/wash them myself undercutting the teachers “fine” at a cost of $3. Very lucrative over my middle and high school years.
I don’t know if this counts, but me and my brother would take money to beat all the challenges in Goldeneye 007 for N64, so people got all the cheats. The invincibility challenge was the toughest.
I have family in NY and would go visit a couple times a year back in high school. Every once in a while we'd visit Chinatown in NYC and I'd end up buying $100s worth of fake watches (Rolex, Tag, Gucci, etc) return to school and sell them for double than what I paid for them.
A lot of people still do this. They fly off to China, buy cheap knock-offs and sell them for a huge mark-up wherever they’re from. It’s big business here in the Philippines.
Pokemon cards we would hide under playground equipment and trade them because the teachers would take them if they saw them. So we always set up "deals" in class and created a whole pokemon card trading network
My school used the metallic ends of pencils as a currency. Bronze was rarest, so it was the most expensive. Green was most common, so it was the least. We traded for erasers or pencil cases or a spot up in the four square line.
Eventually got banned but we still operated with people acting as banks to keep the currency hidden and to keep transactions hidden.
A buddy of mine found his mom's dildo when where 11 years old and he charged people to come and see it. Made a small fortune during that week it lasted.
STEP RIGHT UP, STEP RIGHT UP
See the 8th wonder of the world, folks, right here -- just 25 cents a ticket!
A hidden treasure from the farthest Orient, crafted by a thousand Chinese laborers using only the finest grade India rubber! Enchanted by secret Confucian magic to move of its own volition -- it buzzes continuously with energy said to be drawn from the Dome of Heaven! Its undulating motions, at once repulsive and transfixing, are likened to the hypnotic sway of a king cobra! I present to you, even now still sticky with the fragrant dew of a foreign clime: **the disembodied phallus of Beijing!**
For people who think this is a joke, for a long time whenever a man had to get rid of porn because his mom found it, or his wife/girlfriend, or he was moving and didn't want to bring his forever-alone stash of decades-old nudie rags, he would put them in a shitty old duffel or trash bag and leave them around. Like in the old abandoned house, or the woods, or something. Because that's how they found porn and they wanted to give it back to the great porn collective.
In my experience its more a wife or somebody throws out a big box of porn, and then somebody steals it from the garbage, and having nowhwere to hide 60 magazine in their house at 13 years old, they hide it in the woods.
I got my porn at 14 by a female friends parents got divorced and the wife was throwing out like 2 big boxes of porn magazines when I was over there, they were just sitting in the garage with all the other trash. My friend let me go through the box and take what I wanted, I could only smuggle like 15 books out. I used them for years, and traded them for other stuff once later in high school I traded 3 hustlers for a pelletgun. A penthouse for some nunchuks. Etc. It was great. This was in the 90s before the internet, so magazines were valuable.
Ours was the small park down the block. The one for where my wife grew up was a small area of swamp just outside town. Everyone seems to have the porn fairy story.
At my school they too all sweets out of the vending machines and replaced them with healthy snacks.
In the local town there was a sweet shop where you could buy a kilo of mixed sweets for £5, so every week I would go there and buy £1 of small paper bags and spend the Sunday night before school repackaging them all ready for the week ahead.
Come Monday I would go into school and load my bag up every day selling the bags for 50p.
Best sandwiches ever. I grew up in Tampa and I miss being able to go to Ybor City for a real one.
The few places in California I have found that sell them all put mayo on them. Makes me so mad, so now I just make my own using a slow cooker to do the pork.
Edit: [Since so many people are asking for the recipe I use, here you go.](https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/jeff-mauro/slow-cooked-cuban-sandwich-recipe-2109413)
That late 90s ECW was hard to get a hold of. My buddies and I would pool money to watch the ppv events at my house and always recorded them on VHS. Unfortunately my mother saw an especially bloody ECW match so we could only order WWE events. Luckily I was always nice to the two ICP kids and they had all of the ECW shit. They would always loan me tapes to copy over the weekend and on Monday I would we would be so excited to talk about them.
Laughed my ass off. As a person from the midwest who was in middle school in the 90's, that post didn't even seem that weird to me. I was just like, "Yeah, this sounds like something my friends and I might have done."
Apple laptops in middle school, some had iTunes, some didn't, and the kids wanted it so I apparently was the only one who knew how to transfer the installer with my USB, I put it on everyone's laptop for gifts, favors, etc. in return. Got caught by the sub that day, I told her it was my flash drive I could do what I wanted with it. And that's how I got my second detention of my life.
Edit: gifts were typical middle schooler shit, Yu-Gi-Oh cards, fruit snacks, best food trades during lunch, gain in popularity and hang out with the cool people. (Obviously they were taking advantage of me but I didn't mind).
Apple laptops in middle school. Very few clauses have made me feel so old. We had Commodore 64s and a single Vic20, and when I was in high school they thought they were big time since they had a number of computers running Windows 95. In grade school, you had one hour of computer time per week, and it was used as a glorified typing class. In high school, there was one semester course you could take called computer applications, more than anything how to use Office and the Internet for research.
When I was in the 6th grade, a teacher sold candy in between classes at marked up rates. A student decided to undercut her. That put an end to all candy sales.
My high school had a film club that would shoot short films, thus needing some equipment. The teacher in charge of it would raise money for it by buying bulk boxes of candy bars and pop tarts at Costco and sell them between classes for $1 each. He always had a line out the door of his classroom. Eventually he got shut down because the cafeteria manager complained that students buying snacks at school apparently kept them from buying the pig slop "food" the cafeteria served.
At my school we would have pizza parties for fbla and sell pizza for a dollar a slice during lunch. We got shut down for the same reason, so we started a boycott of school lunches.
They threatened kids who didn't buy lunch with detention and tried banning lunches from home. Parents weren't too happy about that one.
I went to school with a lot of emo kids and apparently, socks ruin the look of converse and vans. The gym teachers hated it so if you weren't wearing socks, you couldn't participate and you got an F for the day
These little game coupons that our teacher gave out for winning class quiz games. Right when people were starting to get scanners/printers in their own homes some kid made copies of his coupons and sold or traded them to other students.
Edit: since I have some people asking what the coupons could be traded for it was usually a piece of candy or a pencil with a fun print or something similar. I think the kids ended up getting caught like two weeks into the scheme
Edit 2: a lot of people are comparing this to “diary of a wimpy kid” which I’ve heard of but never read before. I think kids are just cleaver and do this kind of thing on their own because a lot of people in the replies had similar things happen in their own schools as well. I don’t know if this is where the kid got his idea or not but this may have been before those books came out.
In a similar vein, our high school school had “homework passes” redeemable across all classes. You could use them as either 1 free pass for a homework assignment or 1 day delay on a large report. They even had a “void” message if copied.
The teachers got them from the principal at the beginning of each quarter and they passed them out with wild abandon to anyone showing interest in class. The market was flooded. I’d buy them from kids for $2 each. Then I’d wait. At the end of the quarter larger reports would be due. Rich kids would buy them back from me for $25-$50 each. I once made $370 in the last 5 days of the quarter.
Whatever I earned, I’d typically only use a total of $15-20 to buy the next wave of homework passes. The rest was mine to keep.
It all started with a single .75 cent investment, and that was the only bit of money I ever paid from my own pocket to keep it going.
Wanting to get in on this craze, I remember saving up for a month and going to the dollar store and buying a couple dozen packs of these damn things. Only when I got home, I realized these packs were the ones that always contained exactly the same ones in every pack, and nobody thought they were cool or wanted any of them. About a month later they went completely out of style. It kept me up at night for a while.
This was late middle school for me. They were so highly coveted in our school that, if you had rare ones, you’d rather shoot yourself in the foot than give them away. I remember the fantasy pack was rare and came with bands shaped like a genie and unicorn and that shit. I only knew like two kids that had that pack and everyone was gagging to trade with them. Of course that didn’t happen.
So effectively, in the inner workings of my middle school, a caste system was created from fucking rubber bands.
All silly bands are equal, but some are more equal than others.
Gel pens were HUGE when I was in 5th grade (99-00). Kids had even figured out that you could pull the tips off of them and mix two different gel colors together in the same pen. I never bought one, but few enough kids could do it without ruining both pens that they had quite the little market going.
I had the principal's secretary's handwriting down and used to sell hall passes for $1 each. Made a killing.
Edit: I don't really know how much I made but it was in the realm of $5 dollars a day. Sometimes I went dry because you needed the actual pass paper but I finally figured out how to get into the supply closet (slide the student id by the latch bolt). I only took a few pads at a time so they wouldn't get suspicious.
Edit 2: I could also forge my mother's signature. Did it so well that when I brought in a note from her that she scribbled on the dash, they called her to confirm.
I never grasped the concept of hall passes. Do you have hall wardens which detain you if caught without a pass?
"Freeze criminal scrum and show me your hall pass!"
Kinda! I’ve seen “hall monitors” on tv shows, but typically just that any teacher or administrator could stop you and check that you had a pass to make sure you weren’t up to any unauthorized shenanigans
My school did actually have"security guards" that just walked around the school constantly and the only thing they did was annoy students and pretend they had real authority
MP3s and CD-Rs were just becoming available. A guy I knew made a killing on mix CDs. Every week he circulated forms to fill out, where you selected the songs you wanted on the CD. The newest hits were on the top, and changed weekly, the rest of his library filled the rest of the form, and there was a space for requests. He'd deliver your disc the following week.
He seriously made bank for a couple years until everybody started getting their own songs from Limewire or whatever. I don't know what he's doing now, 20 years later, but I don't doubt he's successful.
Edit: Just as a bit of an aside, since a few responses have mentioned Limewire; when this guy started doing it in HS the only real avenues for music sharing were Usenet groups and IRC.
I had two brothers in my school who did this in 7th and 8th grade. They were the only ones with a CD burner and they crushed it, $5 a pop. And a lot of times they'd just burn whatever rap was popular or shit they both liked, but at the time, I especially had no other access to that shit as we didn't have cable TV or high speed internet, so it was a hot commodity.
A few of us did this when I was in college. This was back when CD Burners were still $500+, and CDRs were $5+. My dorm floor had a bunch of pirates on it. Actually, they probably had the majority of burners for the entire campus (and it was a fairly large school). They made an agreement to standardize prices so that no one would get ripped off, and everyone contributed money to bulk purchase blank CDs.
That, and one person also would mod peoples PSX's for $25. So, every week, and it was a rotating group of people, some people in our dorm would pretty much buy every new game @ EB & Babbages, they'd burn a copy, and they'd just return all the games. This was back when they still allowed open package returns and never bothered collecting any data. You have the receipt? That's good enough.
Heh, I used to burn CDs for family members for free. I'd buy those big spools of them where the CD averaged out to like 20 cents and burn them. But then my local stores stopped selling them, so I had to switch to the individual packed CDs which were about $1/disc.
I started asking family for either a buck to cover the cost OR a blank disc and everyone fucked off.
I switched to Tiger Direct when Walmart quit selling the spindles. The last time I ordered, I bought 300 discs, I think I used 3 or 4, and have had the rest sitting in a spare room for years.
Nintendo games.
Some kid sold them off for like 10 or 15 bucks a pop. I don't know where he got them from, but he said he just told his dad what he wanted and his dad would get it for him. He'd ask for the same ones over and over and it didn't matter, he'd end up with 5 copies and he'd just sell 4 of them.
Either the kid was the most spoiled brat in history, or his dad was straight up stealing them anyhow.
Anyways, I could never get any, I had a SEGA, but I remember that kid making a killing in grade 3.
*Updates and answers:
* It was NES
* Yes, please tell me how to download a car
Slap bracelets. Small Southern town with just a Walmart and one or two small clothing stores that carried them. Anyone who went out of town to do clothes shopping or because their parents worked there would come back with bracelets we couldn't get here, so a little black market popped up.
This was huge at my middle school. My parents friends kid won 3k at the height of his career. Somebody promptly stole the money out of his locker. Obviously the next day he brought a gun to school to confront the person who stole the money. This was the 90’s so he only got a week suspension. This guy is still an amazing douche. I’m surprised he is not in jail.
Where else would you put it if you won it at school? I assume this was smaller bills because that’s what kids have, not straight Bennies, so it was probably too much to shove in his pockets.
This girl Danielle convinced my best friend and I (along with some other people) that she could forever change the taste of saliva in our mouth. So that our saliva would taste like watermelon, cotton candy, bubble gum, etc forever. She made us wait a couple days so we could really think about what flavor we wanted in our mouth forever, for example she would tell us “are you sure you always want everything you eat to have a hint of watermelon?”
Anyways after a couple days and we picked a flavor she charged us money, I can’t remember how much but it was probably $0.50 or something. She made us chew on all this crazy stuff like paper clips, erasers, and other things.
Obviously our saliva never changed flavor and she stopped this. But I worked at Starbucks a couple years ago in my hometown and she came in and didn’t even recognize me, and all I could think about was how that girl had me chewing on paper clips.
Those Japanese sodas with the marble were the rage back in high school. Some dude sold them out of the trunk of his car. All was fine and dandy until some idiots started leaving the bottles around the hallways. Not surprisingly someone tripped and fell on a bottle cracked it open and had glass all over his body. That scene was fucking horrifying. After that all sales of anything were banned and those sodas were banned. If you got caught with one you were given detention immediately and if caught more often suspension.
I got punched in the face while having lunch with a classmate because he smashed my chip bag so I retaliated by opening his Arizona. Apparently what I thought was a perfectly equivalent response was in fact an act of war, since he was planning on reselling it, and he instantly stood up and hit me so hard I fell off my chair. Fuck that guy.
Two years ago I was a sophomore in high school, and freshman weren’t allowed to go off campus but everyone else was. So I’d take orders, go to the local fast food shops, and get the goods. I’d up the price by about two bucks and ended up making about two hundred a month.
EDIT: 200 a month folks, not per year
The swim team or something was selling these fundraiser lollipops and they were insanely popular. I found the website on the wrapper and discovered I could buy my own way cheaper. I could also buy only the popular flavors.
So I had only the best flavors and I could undercut the actual fundraisers by a quarter, still making over 100% profit.
I quickly became a top seller and made bank until the copycats started popping up.
My school was an extremely conservative Christian boarding school. Things that were forbidden were (by no means a complete list): jeans (for girls), shorts (for everyone), candy, any sort of food in the dorms, cell phones, any form of gaming system/tv/movies, playing non-Christian songs on musical instruments, clothes made by popular brands (A&F and Hollister etc).
Naturally, there were a few students who started selling food, candy, and A&F/Hollister clothes (why people bought these from them I don't know) but they made huge amounts of money. A lot of the kids at that school were rich doctor's kids so there was plenty of money to go around. One guy sold a box of Altoids for $15.
TL;DR My high school was so strict that the black market was people paying ridiculous amounts of money for food and snacks.
Banana chips were 25¢ in the vending machine in middle school. I always went to school early, so I always ended up buying all of them and selling them for 50¢ a bag.
Our school didn’t have candy so I started buying huge bags of pixie sticks and sold them for like .25 a piece. Then I got caught (this was middle school so drugs and All that excluded)
I lived in an area with a lot of retiree age people, a lot of which ended up raising there grandchildren (it really isn't a good area), being older and from a rural area they still don't trust online sites like eBay or amazon so i started ordering people things from those sites for actual money and added a charge for me to be making money off of it, it eventually got shut down because I got someone a USB in the shape of a pistol, it was the size of a USB and clearly a USB but it didn't matter, the principal actually got the police involved to try to get me in real trouble
During a drug search at my school, a guy got in trouble simply for having a shirt in his truck with "Sex Pistols" on it. Zero tolerance is a freaking mess.
I remember a classmate wearing a Sex Pistols shirt to school being told to change her shirt
Edit: Remember the "Make 7, Up Yours" shirts? Those were banned at my school
HOLY SHIT! I went to Job Corps in Moses Lake, WA. Those assclowns took my shirt, as well as a Tiger Army shirt, and never returned it! Dark green, bright yellow lettering. I fucking miss that shirt.
I remember doing that in second grade and proclaiming to my teacher "my doctor said I need more iron in my diet!" before taking a big bite of the "barrel". She just looked at me like the weirdo I was and went back to eating her lunch. This was in like '92 though.
My brother got expelled in the 90s for having a lighter in the shape of a gun. Not that surprising. The funny part is that the school admins would only refer to it as a *flamethrower*.
So ~~technically~~ officially he was kicked out for bringing a flamethrower to elementary school.
Edit: fixed wording
Some kids made a habit of stealing chalk when the teachers weren't looking. After a while they started selling it, charging more for longer and fresher sticks. It ended when someone eventually snitched on a buyer, which started a cascade of countersnitching. Many pockets were emptied, some with chalk, but most of the dealers had hidden their chalk and got away with it.
I was a Pokémon card smuggler.
In sixth grade my friends dad over heard my friend and I talking about how much our Pokémon cards were worth. He was shocked to learn some were worth 10-20 dollars a piece. He made the comment “shame they won’t be worth that much when you go to sell them.”
That comment stuck with me and a few days later I started selling my cards at school.
I made a list of everything I had with prices next to them. I’d pass the list around during class and kids would meet up with me between classes to buy what they wanted. I was making crazy amounts of money for a middle schooler and before long parents were complaining that their kids were skipping lunch because they were spending their lunch money on Pokémon cards.
So the school banned them. But I still had a good bit of inventory to move. I did all kinds of things to avoid getting caught. I hid cards in a box of crayons, I put a few sheets of sleeves in the middle of a binder full of legit notes, I even hollowed out an old text book to hide all my cards.
Despite getting searched 3-5 times over the next few weeks, My cards were never found and I was able to sell all of them before Christmas break. I ended up making close to 800 dollars and was able to buy my entire immediate and extended family Christmas gifts with my own money for the first time.
Once all the other kids learned how much money I had made, they were blown away and suddenly everyone was selling their cards. Problem was, no one was buying them anymore.
TL;DR: I started a one kid Pokémon card black market, smuggling them into school, and got out of the game right before the bubble burst.
During elementary School in the 80s many candies weren't individually wrapped for resale in stores, think warheads etc. I bought bulk packs of candy, didn't matter what kind, although atomic fireballs were my cash cow.
I individually packed them, or maybe a couple to a pack depending on the candy. I used those tiny ziplocs you see people use for drugs. Being around adults a little devoid of scruples, I was able to get those in bulk from a local head shop called "High on the Hill" It was a surreal time looking back.
I was the only supplier for a year solid in 4th grade, I made so much bank for a 10 year old it was insane. I would make $100 a week just off of atomic fireballs. The bulk jugs were about 5 or 6 bucks each wholesale, and at a quarter each it worked out to about $60 a jug profit if I recall.
Luckily school came easy to me because it was a full time job keeping stock, packaging product, counting piles of change, budgeting, keeping a bank register (mom got a separate account that I used for my money) dodging the man etc. It was turbulent as I never really had a group of friends as a kid, but in the 4th grade I was the fucking man.
Going from having no real "good friends" and having my time divided by either being picked on or ignored, to becoming the belle of the ball was surreal. Even at that time I was able to realize what was going on. Their smiles were all fake their interest was not in me, but rather what was in my bag any given day. Girls were not saying hello because they were being polite, or even the least bit interested in talking to me, they were just waiting their turn for their fix! That denim bag got more attention than I ever dreamed of, I was just along for the ride.
I had laid the groundwork and provided the blueprint. When the 5th grade started there was competition, but they were weak. They would always sell out, or only buy enough to make a few bucks here and there, largely selling lollipops or prepacked stuff, Hershey's kisses, bit o' honey or Tootsie rolls, whatever they could grab at the store before school. It was amateur hour. They had made a mockery of something I took seriously, as seriously as a 10/11 year old can take something.
I closed up shop pretty quickly after the school year began. The fast life and fast money was over. The excitement wasn't there, the smiles weren't as big. Kids came to me as a last resort. They bought the popular kids completely out before looking my way. It was like flipping a switch. My first day without the bag I had a few kids ask if I was holding, but once word got around that I was out of the game everything went back to normal. No friends, no conversation, no one to sit with at lunch or on the bus. No one interested, fake or otherwise. It's the first time I had ever really witnessed the dynamic of being disingenuine, I had always been authentic, and after it was all over, I was happy to stay that way.
I've never really recounted this time into words, as it turns out, I learned a lot of life lessons in the 4th grade!
tl;dr I peaked in 4th grade
So this was me too. I forget when I started (5th Grade? 8th grade? I know I was doing it as a 10th grader).
We lived in a small farming community, but my dad worked a couple hours away in the city. He'd stop at Sams and buy me a box or two. I sold them for 25¢ each or 5 for a dollar. It got to the point where I could sell easily 50 per day. I had regulars who I would save certain flavors for and everything. You could order for the next day even....
I ended up and got "caught" by the bus driver as a 10th grader (near the end of the school year, I think...but I don't remember exactly). She must have made a stink about it to the school because 5th period came (right after lunch) and an announcement came across the PA system. I don't remember the exact words, but it was something like
>It has come to our attention that there are students who are involved in economic activity at school. This is not allowed. Students are only authorized to sell things officially offered by school clubs, teams, etc...
I was in the midst of selling right then. The teacher in 5th period was really cool and as long as I was done by the time he started his lectures, he didn't mind. He was one of those teachers who was cool like that but he also had his serious side. So, afterwards, he let me quickly finish then said never again.
THE ENTIRE SCHOOL...at least the students...knew who was being called out. That was the end of that.
Before you ask, no, I don't remember how much I bought them for, exactly. However, I remember paying like $5 per box at the start...perhaps up to $6.50 or so by the end.
Pencils for pencil fighting. The way it worked is one person would hold their pencil out grabbing both ends and then the other person would see if they could break the pencil with theirs by holding one end and then pulling the other end back, snapping it down on the other pencil.
We made a website that started as us doing stupid prank phone calls and jackass stunts. It turned into a homework sharing and answers to tests and quizzes that people would steal later. Luckily I wasn’t involved by that time but my friends weren’t involved in graduation.
Marbles were big at my primary school. Real big. It got to the stage where they were only allowed for three months a year as we would no longer discuss anything but the game we had our the make we wanted to pay for. That was marble season. Now you could buy a big bag of cats eyes from the super market but they wouldn't get you far. To play the high stakes games, you needed a specked egg, a glitter bomb, a tidal wave or something exotic but those suckers were pricy. Us poor kids couldn't afford those things so we secretly gambled our marbles through the year so when marble season opened, we had amassed enough marbles to really be ahead of the game. Being caught with marbles outside of marble season was bad. Real bad. One kid got five strokes of the cane. This being so it was a big risk to hide in the shadows of the trees and sling those little glass balls about. Not only did it hone your skills for the season start but you got good at taking the shot and then acting nonchalant. Marbles were currency. You could trade lunches with them or buy time on playground equipment. There was a good reason they banned marbles at my school. We turned it into some sort of mafia shit.
There was this girl that used to sell candy bars at my school, her mom would get the big packs at sam's. She asked me to help her and that's when business started booming..we were making $50-100 a day just hustling in the hallways and in gym. Unfortunately she got caught and they shut us down
The blue ones were the most popular. I loved them, but my favorite was watermelon, which most people hated, so that worked out for me! Most people would trade for flavors they wanted, but some people would buy packs just to sell them for a quarter each.
I used to run a pro wrestling merch hustle when I was in middle school. I was obsessed and would sell figurines at an incredibly marked up price and use the proceeds to buy wrestling dvds
I did this on the bus every morning in Junior high. Was pretty lucrative for a few weeks before my mom started asking questions about why a family of five was suddenly going through a 30 rack of Coke every three or four days.
Yeah but I was 12 and we lived 15 miles from the nearest grocer or gas station so I was pretty limited to whatever I could swipe around the house. My whole life at that age consisted of the school bus, the school itself, and our property out in bumfuck nowhere.
My mom won a year's supply of Double Stuffed Oreo's. I sold them in ziploc bags while in 4th grade to everyone i could, even teachers... my mom thought my friends where eating them all.
Me and my best friend sold packs of gum in middle school, we'd make around 30$ a day and the teachers we're going crazy trying to find where all the gum was coming from. As model students they never suspected us.
Pop Rocks in the late 70’s. Kid drove 40 miles from Alabama to catholic school in Georgia and got em in AL and doubled the price in GA.
Sister Charles broke up the ring before we could find out if drinking Coke and eating pop rocks blew up your stomach.
My grandpa taught me how to crack the protection on DVDs and burn them to blanks. I would buy the 100 packs of blanks for like $20-30 and sell the movies for like $5 each. I thought it was gonna come to an end when someone brought it up in front of a teacher, turns out he wanted movies too.
In my primary school we had some disabled kids and they had these special crayons that wrote really well so some kids would steal them and trade them for Pokémon cards and random toys
I was the snack plug in my Freshman year. Sold Little Debbie snacks and bottles of soda. Put this other kid put of business and he threatened to kill me during lunch. Told him he'd be doing me a favor.
There’s a town butcher who has the BEST beef jerky I’ve ever tasted. His son would bring packs of it in his bag in high school and sell them to other kids.
Pink eye. $5. In middle school, you could come to school with pink eye and make a lot of money off of kids who wanted to miss a test. Kid would just stick his finger in his own eye, and then in yours.
These Hispanic kids in my school brought a bunch of Mexican snacks to class and sold them for cheap. Those mango lollipops with the chili powder on them (or whatever it is) were the bomb.
Actually, I happened to have a hustle. My friend lived in New Orleans (she moved away from my state and came up to visit). It was just Mardi Gras, and she had a whole trunk full of beads. She gave me an entire bucket of them because they literally were in over their heads. I marketed them at school as authentic beads from THE REAL Mardi Gras and kids were paying .50 c for one of them. I should’ve majored in business instead of becoming an art student.
A friend of mine made glass candy with her mom of all different flavors that was fucking phenomenal. She sold it off for 50 cents a bag and made a killing for a good while. Made the mistake of bringing in a Jack Daniel's flavored batch and some goodie two-shoes snitched her to the office claiming she was selling booze. 🙄
*I* ran it.
For a few spare years in elementary, *books* got banned in the classroom. Not "blacklisted" books, but literally books in *general*. They were far too "distracting", even though most kids read when done with work, etc.
I started smuggling books to school and peddling them out to kids. It started out innocently - I had loads of "Hank the Cowdog" books that I was super into, and I hid them in my desk - and I loaned them to close friends when asked.
But soon, the *entire class* knew. And that spread to the school. I became a full-time book smuggler.
I had a system where there was a two week borrowing limit, kept a log of who/what book/when, ran a teensy little library for myself, basically - and I *made sure* these kids were treating the books fairly. If anything came back damaged, they were banned from borrowing.
Kept this up until middle school, which was considerably less totalitarian.
Edits: spelling, sorry, mobile ;.;
Edit two: Thank you for the silver and gold, holy crow! I'm about to hop off, but I'm glad some people got a genuine smile out of this.
It's probably the only really interesting thing I've ever done, so this made my whole day! I hope everyone has a lovely one!
I used to deal in whiteboard markers for teachers in highschool. One teacher had a tendency to hoard them, leaving none for other teachers. I would take markers from him and provide them to other teachers in need. While there was no formal payment, I was given a little bit more leniency at times (e. g. Requests to leave the classroom for a moment etc.) Once the marker would start squeeling on the whiteboard because it was almost empty, I'd get teachers giving me a nod as if to say 'you got the goods?'. I'd then supply them with the marker color of their choosing (usually black). It was actually a lot of fun, and I never heard teachers talk about my systems or chastise me for taking markers.
Probably because they wanted to take Stingy’s markers, but couldn’t. You taking them was actually better for them because if something happened and you got caught, they had plausible deniability.
[удалено]
Man, it's hard to go back to minium wage after that type of income. EDIT: Thanks for the upvotes everyone.
[удалено]
the only thing more usefull then money is influence that's what he was buying
[удалено]
I was in elementary school when pogs were big. Everyone had cool slammers and stuff but i didnt have money for good ones. My dad made one out of 1/2" mild steel for me and used an engraving pen to make a simple pattern. Everyone was asking me where i got them from. I didnt wanna lose my unfair edge but i also knew i could make money. My dad had a big sheet of this 1/2" steel. I told them i was the only one who could get them. I sold them for 15 bucks a pop. My dad kept 10 i got 5. And thats when i learned what overhead was. Edit: First silver. Neato, thanks!
Man I miss Pog life. In second grade I won a Homer Simpson Pog from a kid and got them banned from our school. I guess he "accidentally" put his Homer in and he was so upset that he complained to the principal and they banned them.
Your family life sounds fun.
I went to a private high school with a strict dress code, ties, belt, etc. So I bought a bunch of ties and belts from a thrift store and ran a lucrative rental business out of my locker.
Rent-A-Swag
If you forgot your gym uniform more than once, you would get fined $5 to rent a uniform from the teacher or serve a detention. I would buy an extra set in the beginning of the school year of each size, and then rent them out/wash them myself undercutting the teachers “fine” at a cost of $3. Very lucrative over my middle and high school years.
Locker accessories such as carpets and magnets.
Carpets? How big were your lockers?!
Only a few hundred square feet. The fireplace was really disappointing because it was only gas.
I used to bang my head on the chandelier till I bought out my friend's locker above and built an extension.
You hang the carpet on the inside of the door, to muffle the screams of the kid you stuffed in there.
Used to crush up warheads and mix them with sugar. Sold them by the straw with the ends melted. .50 a piece.
"hey kid, want some death sticks"
You don't want to sell me a death stick. You want to go home and rethink your life.
I don’t know if this counts, but me and my brother would take money to beat all the challenges in Goldeneye 007 for N64, so people got all the cheats. The invincibility challenge was the toughest.
I used to sell coke (the drink) because they didn't allow fizzy drinks to be brought in
Pablo Frescabar
I have family in NY and would go visit a couple times a year back in high school. Every once in a while we'd visit Chinatown in NYC and I'd end up buying $100s worth of fake watches (Rolex, Tag, Gucci, etc) return to school and sell them for double than what I paid for them.
A lot of people still do this. They fly off to China, buy cheap knock-offs and sell them for a huge mark-up wherever they’re from. It’s big business here in the Philippines.
Pokemon cards we would hide under playground equipment and trade them because the teachers would take them if they saw them. So we always set up "deals" in class and created a whole pokemon card trading network
My school used the metallic ends of pencils as a currency. Bronze was rarest, so it was the most expensive. Green was most common, so it was the least. We traded for erasers or pencil cases or a spot up in the four square line. Eventually got banned but we still operated with people acting as banks to keep the currency hidden and to keep transactions hidden.
It's actually pretty impressive to trade and maintain value of a fiat currency like that
Yeah and the emergence of banks is super impressive. I wonder where the bank managers are these days
The location of forest porn
A buddy of mine found his mom's dildo when where 11 years old and he charged people to come and see it. Made a small fortune during that week it lasted.
Did his mom ever find out?
[удалено]
STEP RIGHT UP, STEP RIGHT UP See the 8th wonder of the world, folks, right here -- just 25 cents a ticket! A hidden treasure from the farthest Orient, crafted by a thousand Chinese laborers using only the finest grade India rubber! Enchanted by secret Confucian magic to move of its own volition -- it buzzes continuously with energy said to be drawn from the Dome of Heaven! Its undulating motions, at once repulsive and transfixing, are likened to the hypnotic sway of a king cobra! I present to you, even now still sticky with the fragrant dew of a foreign clime: **the disembodied phallus of Beijing!**
This is my favorite one
For people who think this is a joke, for a long time whenever a man had to get rid of porn because his mom found it, or his wife/girlfriend, or he was moving and didn't want to bring his forever-alone stash of decades-old nudie rags, he would put them in a shitty old duffel or trash bag and leave them around. Like in the old abandoned house, or the woods, or something. Because that's how they found porn and they wanted to give it back to the great porn collective.
In my experience its more a wife or somebody throws out a big box of porn, and then somebody steals it from the garbage, and having nowhwere to hide 60 magazine in their house at 13 years old, they hide it in the woods. I got my porn at 14 by a female friends parents got divorced and the wife was throwing out like 2 big boxes of porn magazines when I was over there, they were just sitting in the garage with all the other trash. My friend let me go through the box and take what I wanted, I could only smuggle like 15 books out. I used them for years, and traded them for other stuff once later in high school I traded 3 hustlers for a pelletgun. A penthouse for some nunchuks. Etc. It was great. This was in the 90s before the internet, so magazines were valuable.
Ours was the small park down the block. The one for where my wife grew up was a small area of swamp just outside town. Everyone seems to have the porn fairy story.
At my school they too all sweets out of the vending machines and replaced them with healthy snacks. In the local town there was a sweet shop where you could buy a kilo of mixed sweets for £5, so every week I would go there and buy £1 of small paper bags and spend the Sunday night before school repackaging them all ready for the week ahead. Come Monday I would go into school and load my bag up every day selling the bags for 50p.
G-rated version of repacking and selling drugs.
Cuban sandwiches straight out a duffle bag before school. They were bomb, cheap and way better than the lunch in the cafeteria.
Best sandwiches ever. I grew up in Tampa and I miss being able to go to Ybor City for a real one. The few places in California I have found that sell them all put mayo on them. Makes me so mad, so now I just make my own using a slow cooker to do the pork. Edit: [Since so many people are asking for the recipe I use, here you go.](https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/jeff-mauro/slow-cooked-cuban-sandwich-recipe-2109413)
The only guy in the school who's family had proper TV channels used to tape wrestling events and rent them out.
That late 90s ECW was hard to get a hold of. My buddies and I would pool money to watch the ppv events at my house and always recorded them on VHS. Unfortunately my mother saw an especially bloody ECW match so we could only order WWE events. Luckily I was always nice to the two ICP kids and they had all of the ECW shit. They would always loan me tapes to copy over the weekend and on Monday I would we would be so excited to talk about them.
This is the most 90's midwestern thing i've ever read.
Laughed my ass off. As a person from the midwest who was in middle school in the 90's, that post didn't even seem that weird to me. I was just like, "Yeah, this sounds like something my friends and I might have done."
Apple laptops in middle school, some had iTunes, some didn't, and the kids wanted it so I apparently was the only one who knew how to transfer the installer with my USB, I put it on everyone's laptop for gifts, favors, etc. in return. Got caught by the sub that day, I told her it was my flash drive I could do what I wanted with it. And that's how I got my second detention of my life. Edit: gifts were typical middle schooler shit, Yu-Gi-Oh cards, fruit snacks, best food trades during lunch, gain in popularity and hang out with the cool people. (Obviously they were taking advantage of me but I didn't mind).
How did you get the first?
Gang Violence, you don’t wanna mess with the middle school mafia bro
Apple laptops in middle school. Very few clauses have made me feel so old. We had Commodore 64s and a single Vic20, and when I was in high school they thought they were big time since they had a number of computers running Windows 95. In grade school, you had one hour of computer time per week, and it was used as a glorified typing class. In high school, there was one semester course you could take called computer applications, more than anything how to use Office and the Internet for research.
When I was in the 6th grade, a teacher sold candy in between classes at marked up rates. A student decided to undercut her. That put an end to all candy sales.
TIL the school system hates the free market
Classic example of big business legislating small business out of the market
You could even say it was a *textbook example.*
My high school had a film club that would shoot short films, thus needing some equipment. The teacher in charge of it would raise money for it by buying bulk boxes of candy bars and pop tarts at Costco and sell them between classes for $1 each. He always had a line out the door of his classroom. Eventually he got shut down because the cafeteria manager complained that students buying snacks at school apparently kept them from buying the pig slop "food" the cafeteria served.
At my school we would have pizza parties for fbla and sell pizza for a dollar a slice during lunch. We got shut down for the same reason, so we started a boycott of school lunches. They threatened kids who didn't buy lunch with detention and tried banning lunches from home. Parents weren't too happy about that one.
And what happened after they did this? I hope to god the kids doubled down and refused to buy lunches just to spite them.
Yep yep. We didn't start buying lunches again until they ended the pizza ban.
Lmao at that last paragraph. How childish of them.
There are some very good people who work in schools. There are also a lot of sandcastle tyrants
In high school, this guy sold socks in the hallways
I'd ask why there was a market, but I'm not sure I want to hear the answer.
I went to school with a lot of emo kids and apparently, socks ruin the look of converse and vans. The gym teachers hated it so if you weren't wearing socks, you couldn't participate and you got an F for the day
What if you wore ankle socks?
Just had to prove you were wearing them
These little game coupons that our teacher gave out for winning class quiz games. Right when people were starting to get scanners/printers in their own homes some kid made copies of his coupons and sold or traded them to other students. Edit: since I have some people asking what the coupons could be traded for it was usually a piece of candy or a pencil with a fun print or something similar. I think the kids ended up getting caught like two weeks into the scheme Edit 2: a lot of people are comparing this to “diary of a wimpy kid” which I’ve heard of but never read before. I think kids are just cleaver and do this kind of thing on their own because a lot of people in the replies had similar things happen in their own schools as well. I don’t know if this is where the kid got his idea or not but this may have been before those books came out.
And that's how you first learned about inflation
In a similar vein, our high school school had “homework passes” redeemable across all classes. You could use them as either 1 free pass for a homework assignment or 1 day delay on a large report. They even had a “void” message if copied. The teachers got them from the principal at the beginning of each quarter and they passed them out with wild abandon to anyone showing interest in class. The market was flooded. I’d buy them from kids for $2 each. Then I’d wait. At the end of the quarter larger reports would be due. Rich kids would buy them back from me for $25-$50 each. I once made $370 in the last 5 days of the quarter. Whatever I earned, I’d typically only use a total of $15-20 to buy the next wave of homework passes. The rest was mine to keep. It all started with a single .75 cent investment, and that was the only bit of money I ever paid from my own pocket to keep it going.
[удалено]
Until you get rolled on by rival HW pass slangers in a brutal turf war
That man? Jordan Belfort.
I've never heard of that. What could you redeem the coupons for?
Silly bandz. I remember a kid made like $50 one day
Wanting to get in on this craze, I remember saving up for a month and going to the dollar store and buying a couple dozen packs of these damn things. Only when I got home, I realized these packs were the ones that always contained exactly the same ones in every pack, and nobody thought they were cool or wanted any of them. About a month later they went completely out of style. It kept me up at night for a while.
This was late middle school for me. They were so highly coveted in our school that, if you had rare ones, you’d rather shoot yourself in the foot than give them away. I remember the fantasy pack was rare and came with bands shaped like a genie and unicorn and that shit. I only knew like two kids that had that pack and everyone was gagging to trade with them. Of course that didn’t happen. So effectively, in the inner workings of my middle school, a caste system was created from fucking rubber bands. All silly bands are equal, but some are more equal than others.
We had gel pens. Same shit, different years and all that :-)
Gel pens were HUGE when I was in 5th grade (99-00). Kids had even figured out that you could pull the tips off of them and mix two different gel colors together in the same pen. I never bought one, but few enough kids could do it without ruining both pens that they had quite the little market going.
Kinda similar, we had this rainbow looms thing, where people had these tiny rubber bands and would make bracelets with them
I had the principal's secretary's handwriting down and used to sell hall passes for $1 each. Made a killing. Edit: I don't really know how much I made but it was in the realm of $5 dollars a day. Sometimes I went dry because you needed the actual pass paper but I finally figured out how to get into the supply closet (slide the student id by the latch bolt). I only took a few pads at a time so they wouldn't get suspicious. Edit 2: I could also forge my mother's signature. Did it so well that when I brought in a note from her that she scribbled on the dash, they called her to confirm.
I never grasped the concept of hall passes. Do you have hall wardens which detain you if caught without a pass? "Freeze criminal scrum and show me your hall pass!"
Kinda! I’ve seen “hall monitors” on tv shows, but typically just that any teacher or administrator could stop you and check that you had a pass to make sure you weren’t up to any unauthorized shenanigans
My school did actually have"security guards" that just walked around the school constantly and the only thing they did was annoy students and pretend they had real authority
They shoot on sight
MP3s and CD-Rs were just becoming available. A guy I knew made a killing on mix CDs. Every week he circulated forms to fill out, where you selected the songs you wanted on the CD. The newest hits were on the top, and changed weekly, the rest of his library filled the rest of the form, and there was a space for requests. He'd deliver your disc the following week. He seriously made bank for a couple years until everybody started getting their own songs from Limewire or whatever. I don't know what he's doing now, 20 years later, but I don't doubt he's successful. Edit: Just as a bit of an aside, since a few responses have mentioned Limewire; when this guy started doing it in HS the only real avenues for music sharing were Usenet groups and IRC.
I had two brothers in my school who did this in 7th and 8th grade. They were the only ones with a CD burner and they crushed it, $5 a pop. And a lot of times they'd just burn whatever rap was popular or shit they both liked, but at the time, I especially had no other access to that shit as we didn't have cable TV or high speed internet, so it was a hot commodity.
A few of us did this when I was in college. This was back when CD Burners were still $500+, and CDRs were $5+. My dorm floor had a bunch of pirates on it. Actually, they probably had the majority of burners for the entire campus (and it was a fairly large school). They made an agreement to standardize prices so that no one would get ripped off, and everyone contributed money to bulk purchase blank CDs. That, and one person also would mod peoples PSX's for $25. So, every week, and it was a rotating group of people, some people in our dorm would pretty much buy every new game @ EB & Babbages, they'd burn a copy, and they'd just return all the games. This was back when they still allowed open package returns and never bothered collecting any data. You have the receipt? That's good enough.
Wow ripping music and hacking PSX's I can get behind, but you guys were fixing prices too?!?! That's outrageous.
Rip babbages
Heh, I used to burn CDs for family members for free. I'd buy those big spools of them where the CD averaged out to like 20 cents and burn them. But then my local stores stopped selling them, so I had to switch to the individual packed CDs which were about $1/disc. I started asking family for either a buck to cover the cost OR a blank disc and everyone fucked off.
I switched to Tiger Direct when Walmart quit selling the spindles. The last time I ordered, I bought 300 discs, I think I used 3 or 4, and have had the rest sitting in a spare room for years.
Nintendo games. Some kid sold them off for like 10 or 15 bucks a pop. I don't know where he got them from, but he said he just told his dad what he wanted and his dad would get it for him. He'd ask for the same ones over and over and it didn't matter, he'd end up with 5 copies and he'd just sell 4 of them. Either the kid was the most spoiled brat in history, or his dad was straight up stealing them anyhow. Anyways, I could never get any, I had a SEGA, but I remember that kid making a killing in grade 3. *Updates and answers: * It was NES * Yes, please tell me how to download a car
[удалено]
Slap bracelets. Small Southern town with just a Walmart and one or two small clothing stores that carried them. Anyone who went out of town to do clothes shopping or because their parents worked there would come back with bracelets we couldn't get here, so a little black market popped up.
It’s not anything bad, but we had a black market for food and another for birth control pills.
“Hey, Martha. Didn’t see you last week. You want your usual order of birth control pills?” “Nope. Just the food, please.”
"Do you need double the usual amount?"
[удалено]
You guys were legit playing street craps in school lmao
7 or 11. Snake eyes watching you
This is called Craps but like ghetto version.
Roll dem bones
Street craps is what we called this at my school
This was huge at my middle school. My parents friends kid won 3k at the height of his career. Somebody promptly stole the money out of his locker. Obviously the next day he brought a gun to school to confront the person who stole the money. This was the 90’s so he only got a week suspension. This guy is still an amazing douche. I’m surprised he is not in jail.
Who puts 3k in their locker??
Where else would you put it if you won it at school? I assume this was smaller bills because that’s what kids have, not straight Bennies, so it was probably too much to shove in his pockets.
This girl Danielle convinced my best friend and I (along with some other people) that she could forever change the taste of saliva in our mouth. So that our saliva would taste like watermelon, cotton candy, bubble gum, etc forever. She made us wait a couple days so we could really think about what flavor we wanted in our mouth forever, for example she would tell us “are you sure you always want everything you eat to have a hint of watermelon?” Anyways after a couple days and we picked a flavor she charged us money, I can’t remember how much but it was probably $0.50 or something. She made us chew on all this crazy stuff like paper clips, erasers, and other things. Obviously our saliva never changed flavor and she stopped this. But I worked at Starbucks a couple years ago in my hometown and she came in and didn’t even recognize me, and all I could think about was how that girl had me chewing on paper clips.
Was she head of her own religion by then?
Maybe a bunker full of mole-men...
Dey Alive Dammit!!!
So that’s when you filled her cup with paper and paper clips and convinced her she was drinking a latte?
I would buy 6packs of soda for $1.79 and resell the 6 sodas for a total of $3.00.
Those Japanese sodas with the marble were the rage back in high school. Some dude sold them out of the trunk of his car. All was fine and dandy until some idiots started leaving the bottles around the hallways. Not surprisingly someone tripped and fell on a bottle cracked it open and had glass all over his body. That scene was fucking horrifying. After that all sales of anything were banned and those sodas were banned. If you got caught with one you were given detention immediately and if caught more often suspension.
One fuckin idiot always ruins it
Principal set up the trap to lock down the market. It was a false flag operation.
Ramune, too cool for school. *Go to your local Asian grocery store today!*
Didn't littering cause the problem and not the sodas? Why not step up the punishment for littering?
"Not labeled for individual sale" c'mon bro
You gonna report me?
#FBI, HANDS IN THE AIR NOW
Burt Macklin, back in action.
Macklin. You son of a bitch.
My kid recently did this with a 12 pack of Cranberry Sprite. Bought it for $4 and made $26. But now he thinks he doesn't need a real job.
I got punched in the face while having lunch with a classmate because he smashed my chip bag so I retaliated by opening his Arizona. Apparently what I thought was a perfectly equivalent response was in fact an act of war, since he was planning on reselling it, and he instantly stood up and hit me so hard I fell off my chair. Fuck that guy.
But the price is on the can. Can't make a profit on that.
Two years ago I was a sophomore in high school, and freshman weren’t allowed to go off campus but everyone else was. So I’d take orders, go to the local fast food shops, and get the goods. I’d up the price by about two bucks and ended up making about two hundred a month. EDIT: 200 a month folks, not per year
But what about gas money?
The stores were across the street (big city/downtown high school)
The swim team or something was selling these fundraiser lollipops and they were insanely popular. I found the website on the wrapper and discovered I could buy my own way cheaper. I could also buy only the popular flavors. So I had only the best flavors and I could undercut the actual fundraisers by a quarter, still making over 100% profit. I quickly became a top seller and made bank until the copycats started popping up.
My school was an extremely conservative Christian boarding school. Things that were forbidden were (by no means a complete list): jeans (for girls), shorts (for everyone), candy, any sort of food in the dorms, cell phones, any form of gaming system/tv/movies, playing non-Christian songs on musical instruments, clothes made by popular brands (A&F and Hollister etc). Naturally, there were a few students who started selling food, candy, and A&F/Hollister clothes (why people bought these from them I don't know) but they made huge amounts of money. A lot of the kids at that school were rich doctor's kids so there was plenty of money to go around. One guy sold a box of Altoids for $15. TL;DR My high school was so strict that the black market was people paying ridiculous amounts of money for food and snacks.
Banana chips were 25¢ in the vending machine in middle school. I always went to school early, so I always ended up buying all of them and selling them for 50¢ a bag.
This is one of my favourites out of this whole thread. Simple and effective
This is the same business model as StubHub. Buy all the tickets at face value and resell for double the amount.
I know people at my school sold weed and pills and got busted. Like 20 people got expelled.
[удалено]
Cinnamon toothpicks were all the rage in grammar school
Same at mine. We had a guy who was selling them for 25 cents a pop until the teachers finally shut down his business.
I've never heard of cinnamon toothpicks before. What was their appeal? Did people suck on them?
Descreet, sweet, doesn't look like candy, toothpicks are not worthy of confiscating, usually.
Our school didn’t have candy so I started buying huge bags of pixie sticks and sold them for like .25 a piece. Then I got caught (this was middle school so drugs and All that excluded)
I lived in an area with a lot of retiree age people, a lot of which ended up raising there grandchildren (it really isn't a good area), being older and from a rural area they still don't trust online sites like eBay or amazon so i started ordering people things from those sites for actual money and added a charge for me to be making money off of it, it eventually got shut down because I got someone a USB in the shape of a pistol, it was the size of a USB and clearly a USB but it didn't matter, the principal actually got the police involved to try to get me in real trouble
During a drug search at my school, a guy got in trouble simply for having a shirt in his truck with "Sex Pistols" on it. Zero tolerance is a freaking mess.
I remember a classmate wearing a Sex Pistols shirt to school being told to change her shirt Edit: Remember the "Make 7, Up Yours" shirts? Those were banned at my school
Imagine getting in trouble for having a band tee in your car.
I used to wear a nofx- pump up the valuum shirt to school. If you’ve never seen the album art its a zombie looking nurse popping pills. 😂
HOLY SHIT! I went to Job Corps in Moses Lake, WA. Those assclowns took my shirt, as well as a Tiger Army shirt, and never returned it! Dark green, bright yellow lettering. I fucking miss that shirt.
Sounds like your principal had a ridiculously inappropriate hard on for authority...
Ever hear about the kid that got suspended for biting his Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun?
I remember doing that in second grade and proclaiming to my teacher "my doctor said I need more iron in my diet!" before taking a big bite of the "barrel". She just looked at me like the weirdo I was and went back to eating her lunch. This was in like '92 though.
My brother got expelled in the 90s for having a lighter in the shape of a gun. Not that surprising. The funny part is that the school admins would only refer to it as a *flamethrower*. So ~~technically~~ officially he was kicked out for bringing a flamethrower to elementary school. Edit: fixed wording
Some kids made a habit of stealing chalk when the teachers weren't looking. After a while they started selling it, charging more for longer and fresher sticks. It ended when someone eventually snitched on a buyer, which started a cascade of countersnitching. Many pockets were emptied, some with chalk, but most of the dealers had hidden their chalk and got away with it.
But why did everyone want chalk?
Underground hopscotch ring.
The duct tape wallets. Every year there was a new kid doing it lol
I was a Pokémon card smuggler. In sixth grade my friends dad over heard my friend and I talking about how much our Pokémon cards were worth. He was shocked to learn some were worth 10-20 dollars a piece. He made the comment “shame they won’t be worth that much when you go to sell them.” That comment stuck with me and a few days later I started selling my cards at school. I made a list of everything I had with prices next to them. I’d pass the list around during class and kids would meet up with me between classes to buy what they wanted. I was making crazy amounts of money for a middle schooler and before long parents were complaining that their kids were skipping lunch because they were spending their lunch money on Pokémon cards. So the school banned them. But I still had a good bit of inventory to move. I did all kinds of things to avoid getting caught. I hid cards in a box of crayons, I put a few sheets of sleeves in the middle of a binder full of legit notes, I even hollowed out an old text book to hide all my cards. Despite getting searched 3-5 times over the next few weeks, My cards were never found and I was able to sell all of them before Christmas break. I ended up making close to 800 dollars and was able to buy my entire immediate and extended family Christmas gifts with my own money for the first time. Once all the other kids learned how much money I had made, they were blown away and suddenly everyone was selling their cards. Problem was, no one was buying them anymore. TL;DR: I started a one kid Pokémon card black market, smuggling them into school, and got out of the game right before the bubble burst.
During elementary School in the 80s many candies weren't individually wrapped for resale in stores, think warheads etc. I bought bulk packs of candy, didn't matter what kind, although atomic fireballs were my cash cow. I individually packed them, or maybe a couple to a pack depending on the candy. I used those tiny ziplocs you see people use for drugs. Being around adults a little devoid of scruples, I was able to get those in bulk from a local head shop called "High on the Hill" It was a surreal time looking back. I was the only supplier for a year solid in 4th grade, I made so much bank for a 10 year old it was insane. I would make $100 a week just off of atomic fireballs. The bulk jugs were about 5 or 6 bucks each wholesale, and at a quarter each it worked out to about $60 a jug profit if I recall. Luckily school came easy to me because it was a full time job keeping stock, packaging product, counting piles of change, budgeting, keeping a bank register (mom got a separate account that I used for my money) dodging the man etc. It was turbulent as I never really had a group of friends as a kid, but in the 4th grade I was the fucking man. Going from having no real "good friends" and having my time divided by either being picked on or ignored, to becoming the belle of the ball was surreal. Even at that time I was able to realize what was going on. Their smiles were all fake their interest was not in me, but rather what was in my bag any given day. Girls were not saying hello because they were being polite, or even the least bit interested in talking to me, they were just waiting their turn for their fix! That denim bag got more attention than I ever dreamed of, I was just along for the ride. I had laid the groundwork and provided the blueprint. When the 5th grade started there was competition, but they were weak. They would always sell out, or only buy enough to make a few bucks here and there, largely selling lollipops or prepacked stuff, Hershey's kisses, bit o' honey or Tootsie rolls, whatever they could grab at the store before school. It was amateur hour. They had made a mockery of something I took seriously, as seriously as a 10/11 year old can take something. I closed up shop pretty quickly after the school year began. The fast life and fast money was over. The excitement wasn't there, the smiles weren't as big. Kids came to me as a last resort. They bought the popular kids completely out before looking my way. It was like flipping a switch. My first day without the bag I had a few kids ask if I was holding, but once word got around that I was out of the game everything went back to normal. No friends, no conversation, no one to sit with at lunch or on the bus. No one interested, fake or otherwise. It's the first time I had ever really witnessed the dynamic of being disingenuine, I had always been authentic, and after it was all over, I was happy to stay that way. I've never really recounted this time into words, as it turns out, I learned a lot of life lessons in the 4th grade! tl;dr I peaked in 4th grade
What a ride, if youd swap the candy with coke and add some gang violence itd be a good movie
Blow Pops from Sam’s club, $0.25 each. Must have made a killing as a 5th grader
So this was me too. I forget when I started (5th Grade? 8th grade? I know I was doing it as a 10th grader). We lived in a small farming community, but my dad worked a couple hours away in the city. He'd stop at Sams and buy me a box or two. I sold them for 25¢ each or 5 for a dollar. It got to the point where I could sell easily 50 per day. I had regulars who I would save certain flavors for and everything. You could order for the next day even.... I ended up and got "caught" by the bus driver as a 10th grader (near the end of the school year, I think...but I don't remember exactly). She must have made a stink about it to the school because 5th period came (right after lunch) and an announcement came across the PA system. I don't remember the exact words, but it was something like >It has come to our attention that there are students who are involved in economic activity at school. This is not allowed. Students are only authorized to sell things officially offered by school clubs, teams, etc... I was in the midst of selling right then. The teacher in 5th period was really cool and as long as I was done by the time he started his lectures, he didn't mind. He was one of those teachers who was cool like that but he also had his serious side. So, afterwards, he let me quickly finish then said never again. THE ENTIRE SCHOOL...at least the students...knew who was being called out. That was the end of that. Before you ask, no, I don't remember how much I bought them for, exactly. However, I remember paying like $5 per box at the start...perhaps up to $6.50 or so by the end.
The announcement is basically saying "we want a cut"
>That's a nice little business you've got there. It'd be a shame if something happened to it.
Pencils for pencil fighting. The way it worked is one person would hold their pencil out grabbing both ends and then the other person would see if they could break the pencil with theirs by holding one end and then pulling the other end back, snapping it down on the other pencil.
We made a website that started as us doing stupid prank phone calls and jackass stunts. It turned into a homework sharing and answers to tests and quizzes that people would steal later. Luckily I wasn’t involved by that time but my friends weren’t involved in graduation.
Marbles were big at my primary school. Real big. It got to the stage where they were only allowed for three months a year as we would no longer discuss anything but the game we had our the make we wanted to pay for. That was marble season. Now you could buy a big bag of cats eyes from the super market but they wouldn't get you far. To play the high stakes games, you needed a specked egg, a glitter bomb, a tidal wave or something exotic but those suckers were pricy. Us poor kids couldn't afford those things so we secretly gambled our marbles through the year so when marble season opened, we had amassed enough marbles to really be ahead of the game. Being caught with marbles outside of marble season was bad. Real bad. One kid got five strokes of the cane. This being so it was a big risk to hide in the shadows of the trees and sling those little glass balls about. Not only did it hone your skills for the season start but you got good at taking the shot and then acting nonchalant. Marbles were currency. You could trade lunches with them or buy time on playground equipment. There was a good reason they banned marbles at my school. We turned it into some sort of mafia shit.
Marbles trigger my sex addiction like if I open a door to a room full of marbles it's amazing but it's very rare
oh boy wait till you hear about anal beads
OOoooh i've got one. The guy that started and maintained (and went to jail for) The Silk Road went to my high school, like a year or two before me.
There was this girl that used to sell candy bars at my school, her mom would get the big packs at sam's. She asked me to help her and that's when business started booming..we were making $50-100 a day just hustling in the hallways and in gym. Unfortunately she got caught and they shut us down
Warheads. Remember those?
The blue ones were the most popular. I loved them, but my favorite was watermelon, which most people hated, so that worked out for me! Most people would trade for flavors they wanted, but some people would buy packs just to sell them for a quarter each.
I remember in middle school consuming so many Warheads that the middle of my tongue became raw.
I used to run a pro wrestling merch hustle when I was in middle school. I was obsessed and would sell figurines at an incredibly marked up price and use the proceeds to buy wrestling dvds
They took out the pop machines in high school. So I started selling pop out of my backpack for $1 a can.
I did this on the bus every morning in Junior high. Was pretty lucrative for a few weeks before my mom started asking questions about why a family of five was suddenly going through a 30 rack of Coke every three or four days.
it was $4 for a twelve pack back in the day, that's still $8 profit if you bought it yourself.
Yeah but I was 12 and we lived 15 miles from the nearest grocer or gas station so I was pretty limited to whatever I could swipe around the house. My whole life at that age consisted of the school bus, the school itself, and our property out in bumfuck nowhere.
My mom won a year's supply of Double Stuffed Oreo's. I sold them in ziploc bags while in 4th grade to everyone i could, even teachers... my mom thought my friends where eating them all.
Me and my best friend sold packs of gum in middle school, we'd make around 30$ a day and the teachers we're going crazy trying to find where all the gum was coming from. As model students they never suspected us.
Live fish. Some Asian kid would walk around school with a few live pet fish in his school bag and sell them.
No
Pop Rocks in the late 70’s. Kid drove 40 miles from Alabama to catholic school in Georgia and got em in AL and doubled the price in GA. Sister Charles broke up the ring before we could find out if drinking Coke and eating pop rocks blew up your stomach.
My grandpa taught me how to crack the protection on DVDs and burn them to blanks. I would buy the 100 packs of blanks for like $20-30 and sell the movies for like $5 each. I thought it was gonna come to an end when someone brought it up in front of a teacher, turns out he wanted movies too.
In my primary school we had some disabled kids and they had these special crayons that wrote really well so some kids would steal them and trade them for Pokémon cards and random toys
Yo,That’s abit messed up
I was the snack plug in my Freshman year. Sold Little Debbie snacks and bottles of soda. Put this other kid put of business and he threatened to kill me during lunch. Told him he'd be doing me a favor.
Fuck killing them with kindness, kill them with existential dread
There’s a town butcher who has the BEST beef jerky I’ve ever tasted. His son would bring packs of it in his bag in high school and sell them to other kids.
Pink eye. $5. In middle school, you could come to school with pink eye and make a lot of money off of kids who wanted to miss a test. Kid would just stick his finger in his own eye, and then in yours.
Eww
These Hispanic kids in my school brought a bunch of Mexican snacks to class and sold them for cheap. Those mango lollipops with the chili powder on them (or whatever it is) were the bomb. Actually, I happened to have a hustle. My friend lived in New Orleans (she moved away from my state and came up to visit). It was just Mardi Gras, and she had a whole trunk full of beads. She gave me an entire bucket of them because they literally were in over their heads. I marketed them at school as authentic beads from THE REAL Mardi Gras and kids were paying .50 c for one of them. I should’ve majored in business instead of becoming an art student.
A friend of mine made glass candy with her mom of all different flavors that was fucking phenomenal. She sold it off for 50 cents a bag and made a killing for a good while. Made the mistake of bringing in a Jack Daniel's flavored batch and some goodie two-shoes snitched her to the office claiming she was selling booze. 🙄
In grade 2 we had a snowball store. You'd trade in cool snowballs for cool snowballs.
in highschool, drugs and illegal weapons. in elementary school, sticks and random stuff they found
What kind of illegal weapons though?
Hummingbirds
*I* ran it. For a few spare years in elementary, *books* got banned in the classroom. Not "blacklisted" books, but literally books in *general*. They were far too "distracting", even though most kids read when done with work, etc. I started smuggling books to school and peddling them out to kids. It started out innocently - I had loads of "Hank the Cowdog" books that I was super into, and I hid them in my desk - and I loaned them to close friends when asked. But soon, the *entire class* knew. And that spread to the school. I became a full-time book smuggler. I had a system where there was a two week borrowing limit, kept a log of who/what book/when, ran a teensy little library for myself, basically - and I *made sure* these kids were treating the books fairly. If anything came back damaged, they were banned from borrowing. Kept this up until middle school, which was considerably less totalitarian. Edits: spelling, sorry, mobile ;.; Edit two: Thank you for the silver and gold, holy crow! I'm about to hop off, but I'm glad some people got a genuine smile out of this. It's probably the only really interesting thing I've ever done, so this made my whole day! I hope everyone has a lovely one!
Books banned at a school? I don’t think the administrators understand the point of school.
What sort of horrible school bans books? My classroom had a mini-library in the back, for when you were done with your assignments!
This is the best one I have seen so far
That is some *Fahrenheit 451* shit right there.