About three weeks ago, my wife sent me a message to say she had found a job advertised that may be an entertaining activity to do with the kids during their summer vacation - teach them about work, keep them occupied and earn a little pocket money. The job was to deliver advertising mail twice a week to an area which covered about 350 houses. Seemed easy enough and I agreed, thinking that my two girls aged five and eleven were more than capable of doing most of this work. I was aware that we would need to supervise and also be present on all deliveries but nonetheless thought that it would work out well. I was excited at the opportunity for my girls to start getting an idea of what it can take to earn money.
So how it works is they drop off the mail to you then you have a deadline by which you need to have it all delivered. When the first delivery arrived, we all stood in awe around a mountain of promotional printed pamphlets nearly blocking the entrance of our front door. There were about three thousand copies of nine different retailer's advertising material we now needed to deliver. A substantially different picture to what we had in mind when we signed up. Turns out it takes two adults about three hours to roll up nine individual pamphlets into one deliverable roll. Also, it's not that easy for a younger child to get it rolled up correctly, so us adults ended up doing the bulk of the work. The little ones helped where they could.
The next problem now becomes the sheer mass of paper you need to transport. I could only guess at it weighing over 100kg in total so walking around with the whole delivery becomes an issue. Our solution was, of course, the boot of the car, but you need to keep moving the car around to cover the area. This again requires full participation from an adult and the little ones are also restricted in how much they can carry. I ended up being the transporter, with a trolley, a bag, and an over-the-shoulder bag and my wife and children would do the running to the mailboxes. I strolled along as they returned periodically for fresh stock.
We'd probably get better at it over time as we work on efficiency, but the initial delivery took four hours. If the delivery was only a single pamphlet and the whole order was easily transportable on foot, then this may have worked out very well. Both my girls will easily walk five kilometers, but just the sheer volume of paper for these deliveries makes it a remarkable challenge for anyone to do alone.
We ended up doing only two such deliveries before deciding that we'd look for an alternative learning activity for the summer vacation. We had no way of knowing without trying, but this was not an ideal activity for children of this age. I must say that that both my girls did an exceptional job at the tasks they were able to carry out and they learned a lot in the process. I noticed a slight reluctance afterward to splurge money on unnecessary possessions and both have opted to rather save the larger portion of their earnings for something later on in life. This is the outcome I had hoped for. We all know how tough it can be out there and I think it's important to teach our children the value of work and how to handle finances.
Thank you for reading,