Good Business

Robyn Jacobs is slumped in the living room with a bad case of the blues. She has been to the mall, she has seen a dress she absolutely must have, and she does not have the money for it. Her allowance will not stretch that far, and moping does not seem to be helping. When her father, Dale, comes home from work and coaxes the trouble out of her, he offers a suggestion instead of sympathy: kids all over the neighborhood earn extra money doing odd jobs, and when he was her age he had a paper route. Robyn is horrified by the very idea. Work? An actual job? There must be, she decides, some way to make money without having to work for it.

She takes the paper route anyway, and it goes about as well as anyone might expect. A dog named Boxer plants himself between Robyn and a front porch until his owner, Mrs. Maddux, calls him off. Then comes worse news. It is half past eleven in the morning, and Mrs. Maddux has always gotten her paper closer to six. Robyn had assumed the newspaper people were joking about that hour. Hauling papers all over the neighborhood, fending off dogs, and waking up before sunrise adds up to more than she signed on for, so when Mrs. Maddux offers ten dollars for an hour of lawn mowing, Robyn does the math and goes looking for the mower. She finishes the job well, collects her lemonade and her ten dollars, and picks up a standing invitation to come back weekly. Mr. Benson, watching from next door, hires her on the spot for his yard too.

Twenty dollars in one afternoon is all the encouragement Robyn needs. She hands the paper route off to Bobby Adams, prints up flyers, and launches Robyn's Rotor Company - Robyn's Rotors for short. The phone starts ringing and does not stop. Dale, watching his daughter turn into a business tycoon, decides to let her learn this one on her own. Soon Robyn is mowing five lawns a day, covered in grass stains, and falling asleep while her proud father is still talking. She is making money and has no time or energy left to spend a penny of it.

The solution seems obvious. She hires her classmates Jack Davis and Oscar as employees, paying them five dollars a job while she keeps the schedule and answers the phone. Suddenly Robyn has free afternoons and a brand-new dress. Then Jack and Oscar turn up on her porch, filthy from work and freshly unionized. They want vacation days, sick days, a health plan, a dental plan, coverage for stubbed toes, and above all a raise, since they have discovered that Robyn collects ten dollars for every lawn they mow. Negotiations stall between seven fifty and seven seventy-five, and the two of them walk off on strike.

Robyn is left with a ringing phone, a wedding reception to mow for, and no crew. She takes the phone off the hook and declares Robyn's Rotors out of business, but her father will not let her walk away from promises she made to people. He asks what she has learned. The harder she tries to get out of work, Robyn admits, the more work she ends up doing - a saying she got from her mother. Dale adds the second lesson: starting a business is a fine thing, but there is no way around the hard work, and the best wage is the one earned for a fair day's work. People do not truly feel good about being paid a lot for doing nothing. Doing an honest job, he tells her, is one of the ways Christians can be fair with others and glorify God, and Paul took it seriously enough to write in Second Thessalonians that a person unwilling to work had no business eating. Robyn takes it in, then tries her luck on a raise in her allowance, which turns into its own round of bargaining.

In the end, Robyn goes back to Jack and Oscar and gives them more than they asked for: the full ten dollars a yard. A worker, she tells them, should be worthy of his wages, and the people swinging the mower are the ones doing the work while she only answers the phone. Jack pockets the deal, crows about easy money, and informs Robyn that she knows nothing about business. Robyn, who has just spent a very long week finding out otherwise, tells him that for once in his life he may be right.