Chicage Sun-Times curmudgeon Terry Savage had a recent fist-shaking post about kids on his lawn giving away “free” lemonade, in which he points out that it’s not really free (the parents paid for it), that giving away a product will lead to negative profit margins and how this is a terrible business lesson for the kids, and now he has a followup in which he points out, again, that it’s not free, et cetera, et cetera.

My recent column about teaching children how to run a lemonade stand seems to have caused quite a furor. In case you missed it, I explained to the young girls — who were giving away their product — that the whole idea of having a business is to figure out your costs and then set a price that gives you a profit. In fact, that’s the basis of our American entrepreneurial, free-enterprise system.

Maybe that was the lesson of his lemonade stand as a child, or would be the lesson if Alex Keaton was your father, but I think he’s just overthinking the problem, or overestimating the teaching value of it. I thought the point of a lemonade stand was to teach kids a lesson about working to earn money, above and beyond taking out the trash, rather than just (possibly) collecting a small allowance. When I was a kid, we charged 2¢ a glass (yes, this was back in the more recent good old days, though I think it went up to a nickel by the time I retired from it and my little brother and his friends took over the business.) There were no discussions or calculations about cost of supplies, profit margins or privileges at the executive wading pool. I was six or so. Teaching us to be entrepreneurs wasn’t the point. The point was that we were going to have to sit out in the hot sun and take turns holding up the sign advertising the stand, and try to get people to stop and buy our product. Exert ourselves, sweat a little and in the interim, be bored. IOW, teach us what an average semi-skilled job was like, and make us not want to do the adult equivalent, so that would be on our minds whenever the ‘rents were convincing us that we needed to do well in school and go to college, so we would have something better to look forward to.

Or maybe they just wanted us out of the house for a few hours, and this was a cheap way of doing it.