You Know the Economy is Bad When…..

As I was returning from an idyllic outdoor birthday brunch for a friend early on Sunday afternoon in Topanga Canyon, another friend and I drove by this small roadside business with its closed sign and figured things had REALLY come to a bad pass when a kid with a lemonade stand was so badly discouraged by the burgeoning fiscal crisis that he or she went to all the trouble to make such a sign.

Sensing a pithy story was lurking, your intrepid reporter (that would be me) backed her car up the curvy canyon side street in order to check out what kind of hard times had befallen the poor lemonade entrepreneur.

As is often true here in So Cal, things were not as they at first appeared to be. The entrepreneur, pictured above, had merely put up the closed sign while he trotted off to use the nearby facilities and, once I had taken my photo, he turned the sign around and sold my friend and me some deliciously fresh orangeade. (He was out of lemonade, or never had lemonade, or his mother would only let him pick the oranges, not the lemons. We never did get that part of the story straight.)

Yet, despite the excellence of the product, the drink business was anything but brisk. In the fifteen minutes it took us to take some photos, buy and consume the aforementioned orangeade, chat about the fact that the -ade purveyor was Irish, “So, I make a good bartender! It’s in my blood!” (Helloooo-o-o-oo, Social Services!!!), and admire the Irish orangeade seller’s stick-eating dog…..not only were there no other customers, there were no other prospective customers either.

I know this because my car completely blocked the road, which means that any and all comers would have had to honk to get me to move.

So was the lack of orangeade biz a consequence of the economic downturn or of a poorly chosen location? It is my professional opinion that this question requires further investigation. (And additional orangeade.)

As Drudge would say: DEVELOPING….