A Street Urchin's no cash, no credit, Business Plan

The true story of a Street Urchin who made a fortune from nothing.

(c) Harry S Richards

As kids in a poor part of town, we collected all kinds of junk to sift through and hopefully resell. Sometimes we were lucky, but mostly we were told to "get lost" with unprintable words to that effect. There was no spare cash at all, so we just had to use our wits to make some. Fortunately, I banded with a group of similar street urchins who were reasonably honest. We just wanted to get some cash without any hassle from the cops.

Our primary source of income came from collecting old newspapers door-to-door. We bundled and tied them into manageable bundles to resell to the waste-paper and scrap dealers of the day.

We knew that as kids we wouldn't get a fair price because we watched adults being paid double what we were for the same weight. Being wise to this, we loaded our bundles with a few bits of scrap iron, until we learned that it was easier to soak half of each bundle in water, making certain that the wet half was positioned in the center to make it undetectable.

That