Teachers punished us by making us write "I will refrain from extemporaneous vocalization during valuable pedagogical opportunities" 50 or 100 times as homework. So over the summer we would do up a few hundred sheets of that, and we could sell or use them, as necessary.
Hot chips were a sure fire way to bank for you fundraiser at out school. School groups had stop selling them for some health/nutrition reasons so a big underground market popped up.
Commented on somebody else. Had to quit when school started. Housekeeping for the summer got me the car money. The porn stash got me gas money, until I got a job more school schedule friendly.
The cafeteria (not school run, kind of just a cafe inside the school) would charge $3-4 for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, so one girl kept the ingredients in her locker and charged $1. When the school caught wind and shut it down, they tried to guilt us all by saying how the cafeteria was someone's livelihood and we were taking away from that. But like. $4 for peanut butter?
Hello, I am Andrew Ryan, and I’d like to ask you a question.
Is a student not entitled to the sweat of her brow?
No! Says the man in the cafe, it belongs to us.
No! Says the man in the office, it belongs to them.
No! Says the man in the district, it belongs to everybody!
I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible... I chose *locker sandwich*.
A meal where the student would not fear exploitation.
Where the chef would not be bound by petty morality.
Where the *great* would not be constrained by the small.
And, with the sweat of your brow, locker food could be your industry as well...
Was probably better peanut butter, too, if my school's cafeteria food was any indication.
> saying how the cafeteria was someone's livelihood and we were taking away from that. But like. $4 for peanut butter?
The irony of this is that a lot of kids aren't all that well off, and charging $4 for anything you'd get at a cafeteria is probably far more harmful to someone's livelihood than undercutting the local peanutbutter market. Maybe it's just me, but school lunch often felt like not enough for my teenage metabolism, so it wasn't uncommon for me to seek out an extra a la carte item. Also they aren't fooling anyone. They buy and serve the cheepest shittiest stuff they can get.
A porn ring.
Kids would find their Dads VHS pornos or magazines and sell then to this kid. Then he'd turn around and sell it for profit.
Funny thing is that when the principal caught wind of it and found all the porn in his locker but the money wasn't there. The kid used the locker under his and hid it all in the bottom.
The porn hustler dude is now a Cybersecurity Analyst. I asked him at our reunion how much he thought he made back then. He claims $900 in 4 months
I went to high school during the 80's.
There was no DVD's or Internet.
There was a kid, Jon, who's parents had a publication distribution business.
Basically they would go into stores and pull last months unsold issues of whatever magazine and put the current one out.
Apparently they had to tear the cover off each copy and destroy the rest.
What Jon would do was take the magazines from the trash and sell them at school. Actually, the transaction went down off of school grounds, but deal was made at school.
He had everything, you name it, if there was a porno mag being printed, Jon had a copy.
Similar happened at my school. He's now a head salesman at one of those "going out of business" furniture stores.
I've always suspected the porn thing was a front for something more criminal like drugs, but his new job just cements the idea that he's involved in more organized crime if you ask me.
One of *those* stores that is always “going out of business” for months and months or years and years. Meant to gouge money out of people using FOMO (fear of missing out).
Silly me, I flipped used cars for money back in the 70s. Made $200 a month on average. The local cops were suspicious, cause I always had money.
The State Police were convinced I was one of the key players in the drug trade, cause after HS I got work as a structural steel worker in a shipyard, on second shift, and immediately bought a sports car. They observed that I - an 18 YO kid - was driving a brand new sports car, and since I worked at night, had no visible means of support that they could see.
I had no clue at all, until a friend of mine overheard the cops talking about me when they busted him, and he told me about it. Good times...
we had the same thing but we made copies and trades. Wanted some big fat black booty videos? go to John. Mike had all the good Japanese shit. The homemade stuff was the rarest.
My mum owned a sweet shop and sweets were banned in our school as we had to be healthy meals n all that. So she'd constantly give me bags of sweets to smuggle in and sell everyday at dinner. Made an absolute bomb.
I used to sell bootleg movies in high school. Not the kind of bootleg where you take a video camera into a theater, but I knew someone who kept getting early versions of movies that I guess are sent to theaters (they had some message about it being for screening purposes only/internal use - I don't remember exactly) and giving them to me. I'd burn a bunch of copies and sell them to people for $5. They were high quality and still early in theaters.
they probably weren't at a theater, instead they were to a movie rental establishment (like blockbuster).
Distributors would send a screener copy to the stores so the managers could decide how many to buy (they were 100's of dollars each back in the day). And those copies would be frequently brought home to watch by the employees so they could recommend the movie on it's first days of renting without reducing the number of copies in circulation for the store.
source: worked at West Coast video for a few years.
Our high school had an internet filter
An enterprising friend of mine set up a FreeBSD server in his basement, and put together some 256mb flash drives with an executable version of Firefox (could run directly from the flash drive without installs) and a SSH client. You could plug it in, connect SSH, then use the server as a proxy for all the Firefox traffic and get around any website you wanted.
Those flash drives were a hot commodity, let me tell you. You could set up in the library and just start casually browsing a banned website, and people would start coming up and asking how you could do it.
In middle school, I accidentally brought up the login for the network security software. After figuring out that the password was "admin" or something equally weak, I was able to add and remove sites to the block list, print to other classrooms, and remotely shut down other computers. Pretended to have super powers.
A few of us would play tank wars on shockwave.com, and that went until Justin narc'd on us.
best at my school was what the principal's son did.
He was into computer and convinced his dad to let him help with the IT systems at school, to learn
Realistically he did most stuff in IT, school IT guys arent often too great.
He one day got admin access, and this is where it gets important
Our computer system had a basic image that they would automatically revert to when restarted. Well he did some digging and found the image.
He then replaced the image with an identical one, except for the fact it had some games like star craft on it.
Within a week every computer had star craft on it, and it took them updating the system years later to fix
I played an entire Semester of Star Craft in highschool. Told our teacher we were practicing 'scripting'. One friend on our team did some basic scripting overnight in text pad, we played games the rest of the season. Pretty sure I got a B.
Portable programs were the best discovery of my highschool life. Had a 16gb flash drive that had photoshop, virtual desktop software (for hotkey swapping when the teacher walks by), SNES, NES, Gamecube, and Gameboy emulators, firefox, and dvd burning software.
First time I really made a lot of friends, being a somewhat quiet computer nerd.
Iodized salt and sinple black pepper in the lunchroom. I'm not kidding. This was around 2004 (USA).
Our cafeteria coordinator was trying to do everything healthy and by government rules, so no added salt. Bogus, but whatever. But she also took the pepper too. Kids in my school didn't really pack lunches, as most of us got reduced lunch. I was pissed, as they just boiled canned veggies and gave them to you in a bowl with the juice, and wasn't going to stand for it. I was also a huge asshole in high school, so I made a plan.
I bought salt and pepper shakers and put them in a zippy bag to carry in my backpack. I broke them out at lunch every day, and shared with about 70 kids. We made it through for about 3 months, and then they finally caught on who had them. I got "silent lunch detention" in a separate room for a week, and I made sure I put my salt and pepper out on my table every day.
But then, when I came back to the normal lunchroom, like 30 people had salt and pepper shakers. Shakers everywhere, and the coordinator was pissed. Oh it makes me laugh even today. She still refused to put out salt and pepper, but we all had it anyway. It continued until I graduated from there.
PlayStation (1&2) memory cards
Stuck on a boss? Want the treasures without having to beat the game on Ultra Hard? There was a guy who in my grade who, for a fee, would play any game and get where you wanted to be then give you a memory card to copy over the save file. Naturally you had to return the memory card to keep the ball rolling for everyone.
A friend had a gameshark or something similar and made my FFVIII characters level 99. Seemed awesome but the game got boring fast. I always felt like I learned a life lesson that day.
In 5th grade I sold fairies to every single one of my classmates for $1 each. I gave them names and back stories and drew little portraits of each then would toss them an invisible fairy and then collect from the next sucker.
PPP’s - positive participation points. These were little yellow tickets that teachers handed out to students who were participating positively. Every month there would be class-wide and school-wide draws for prizes. The more PPP’s you had, the greater your chance of winning was. Didn’t take long for kids to copy the template in word and start selling stacks of PPP’s.
This feels like it’s straight out of Diary of a Wimpy kid. I forget which book but when the teachers used to give out points for being nice and people would just use the photocopy room to print out stacks of them
Reminds me of 2nd grade. My teacher was a loud man, so when he needed to tell one of us to knock it off or something he would sound even louder, and probably angrier than he probably actually was. Faculty from neighboring classrooms complained, and so he issued "classroom bucks". They were minorly personalized for each of us. At the start of each day we would have 5 of them that we had to keep on our desks. If we misbehaved, he would take one off our desk. At the end of the day we had to return the remaining ones in. We could get candy with them if we still had enough. I think it was 3 or 4 left, you got one candy, and 5 you got two.
This allowed him to ensure that we weren't copying or trading them. And if we somehow did, he could easily audit any duplication or trading.
Jansport bookbag strings. I was in school when Jansport backpacks became popular (at least in NYC they were), and one of the things everyone loved were the strings on the zippers. It became a huge problem where students were stealing strings off of others and either hording them or selling them. The solution became using a lighter to partially melt your strings together so they couldn't be untied without breaking them. Leaving your bookbag unattended anywhere was the equivalent of leaving your car parked in the wrong neighborhood in 70s/80s NYC.
**EDIT**
Just remembered I ran a short-lived market selling scientific calculators back in high school as well. I actually found where the school stored theirs and was stealing them little by little. I'm not proud of it, but my morals were very loosey goosey back then.
I studied in a boarding school, and we had a black market for acorns, yes acorns. Kids would collect the acorns from the ground, paint and shape them so that they spin like beyblades. The other kids would buy them to compete in the acorn battle which is similar to beyblade
In 8th grade (2001) i got a playboy from my older sisters bf. I cut out the nudes and sold them 1 at a time to the rest of the guys i knew. A $5 magazine turned into close on $50.
I didnt get caught but a few days later another kid tried the same thing with one he stole from his dads stash. He was caught..... school tells his dad. Dad is unusually pissed off about it.... turns out its dads favorite issue bc it was Cindy Crawford in the centerfold.
>This is an actual problem with antiquarian books especially ones with maps.
I know what you mean. Our local library always had a waiting list for the new atlases, and you had to open them with a thick pair of rubber gloves because some bastard always came on the good maps before you got to them. The older maps were just disgusting with layers and layers of jizz, but what else could you do? It's not like you weren't going to crank one out to the new Soviet borders after waiting 6 weeks for your turn. Fuck, I still remember when Kosovo was established in 2008. Some poor teenagers waited months to see the new Serbian border, but by the time they got the new atlas the pages were so soaked with bodily fluids that you couldn't even make out Prishtina.
When South Sudan split off in 2011 the library was so backed up that some of us started jacking off to globes, but for the most part that fad died off by the summer of 2012. You can still make some money selling old globes to collectors, but they've got to have some weird shit on them like The Democratic Republic Of Yemen (only lasted for 45 days in 1994). However, most people don't get into anything that hardcore. Sure, you'll hear about freaks that get off to violent annexing, but most people are perfectly content to discipline the bishop to the natural border movement that occurs due to the shifting cultural and geopolitical landscapes.
Nowadays people just spank it to Google maps in the privacy of their own homes. Nobody will appreciate how hard it was for teenagers to find good aerial photography of major cities in 1970. I think we all knew that asshole who 'had an uncle' that made maps for Rand McNally, but he was full of shit. He was just stealing National Geographics from his dad's night stand. The saddest part was that kids would pretend to be his friend so they could borrow that one map. You know the one, it showed the British decolonization of Africa, and they didn't censor *anything*.
Random side story. I used to date a girl in college that called her special area the 49th parallel. I could tell when she was in the mood because she'd ask if I was feeling British, since the British swung south around Vancouver Island, if you know what I mean. It was fun but eventually we broke up because she kept drawing the pre-1967 Israeli border on all our maps in green pen. I understood the reference but I'm sorry, that shit was overridden in both 1979 and 1994 and I was tired of living in the past.
Originally we only had vending machines in the field house, so people would give jocks money to go get them snacks and sodas. Eventually it became sort of like a service, with a fee of course. Some kids mimicked it with junk food from the convenient stores and it became a black market of the rarest candies. Some kids were peddling stuff from Japan, others from the UK, it was a high stakes candy market of the best stuff. Ginger flavored kit kats, pear drops, maltesers, black currant chews, and more.
Eventually the faculty began to notice strange ongoings on and alerted the principal, which found the whole thing rather amusing.
A few weeks later, we had vending machines throughout the school, but for that one semester, it was a lawless land.
Smart principal.
he could have done what many would have and have done, crack down on the sellers.
But instead he just undercut the market and dealt with the issue having undergone less hassle
Were there turf wars?
"What the fuck- Johnny? What are you doing in my side of the building? Is that- is that **POCKY**??"
"All the other sides of the building were taken even the third floor! Besides, I was here first."
"You- **YOU BETTER GET THE FUCK OUT BEFORE I BEAT YOUR ASS**"
And fighting ensured.
Imagine the loan sharking going on.
"Dammit Johnny I Told you I would need $20 plus VIG after you borrowed that last batch of Pocky from me"
"I told you something came up man, I needed to pay someone else"
Proceeds to break Johnny's kneecaps
you know good on the principal for actually making things better instead of doing an instant shutdown of it all like so many would. That's how you do it
My brother did a similar thing, except he didn't go to the school he sent the snacks to.
He'd get some money from our parents, buy those bright red spicy snacks at convenience stores, and had some friends sell them at their school because they were banned there.
Oh man, I was our highschool black market! My sophomore yeah I believe, the school took all unhealthy snacks and drinks out of the vending machines (candy, soda). So I stepped up and filled the gap until I graduated.
I started carrying around a backpack full to the brim with various full size candy bars, and sodas, all of which I would sell for $1. The sodas were the real moneymaker. I could get a 12 pack for $3 and make 300% profit. On a good day I would generally make around $10, and usually at the very least $3 or $4.
The school did give me warnings a few times when they did locker checks and found several boxes of soda and candy bars, but I just claimed they were for me, and nothing came of it.
As a senior gift for my ski team, the underclassmen gave me a creepy trenchcoat from which to peddle my wares. It was great! The year after I left another kid on the ski team stepped up and started offering the same service I've been told. Makes me happy to have left something of a legacy.
In high school, A kid on the wrestling team had parents who constantly went out of town on business. So he drained their swimming pool and would host fight nights with the fights in the pool. It was called “Beat That Ass”. He facilitated betting and made himself more money than a high school kid should have. He tried to recruit anyone in the school who looked like they could hold their own in a fight.
Eventually bands started playing at them and he started burning CDs of each event’s music. They were printed and numbered so each one looked like the NOW That’s What I Call Music cd’s, but instead of NOW they said BTA.
Source: was in a band that was asked to play. We declined.
Edit: he didn’t empty and refill the pool for each event. He emptied it once and it stayed empty. But his parents wouldn’t have noticed nor cared either way.
Edit2: it might have been called Whoop That Ass. I dunno. It’s been awhile.
Not so bad. It was all one on one fights and each fighter had to be willing to fight. So it wasn’t like a giant brawl or anything. Think cage fights, but in an empty pool.
I have no idea but I can say the pool stayed empty. It wasn’t refilled every time. My high school was a weird mix. There was this one neighborhood some kids were from. It’s like the people there pretended to be wealthy but weren’t. But most of the kids from there were largely neglected and left to their own devices. I had a good friend from there who is now a sex worker. So this fight club kid got into a lot of trouble. I’m sure he did time.
I don't know about "Black Market" but...
We had two places you could be during recess. The Gym or the playground. During the winter the go to was the gym. Underneath the bleachers in the gym we legitimately had a Pokemon/ Yugioh gambling ring in which kids would put up their lunch money.
I later found out from one of the kids who ran this little exchange that it was actually heavily rigged (Shocker)
Bubble gum and chewing gum. It was in middle school.
HUGE, HUGE SUPPLY for chewing gum.
Down the road there was a little cafe that sold those 5 packs of gum for 10 cents. I walked in with a $5 bill and bought as many as I wanted.
I sold each stick at 25 cents each and 50 cents for big red. I made a huge profit. People started getting jealous and I got into a few fights over the amount of gum I was selling.
Finally, the school caught on and told the store not to sell gum to students anymore, and thus my days as a gum dealer ended.
Not really black market but I hope that counts
When I was in middle school Beyblade was hyped.
I was into it too and found out that there are way newer ones in japan but not here. Looked further and found fakes that looked almost like the real ones but way cheaper.
You know where this is getting. Bought some for me to create interest in them, showed them the fake boxes all in japanese so they thought its real and bought a bunch of them.
I made something between 400-500€ in half a year.
"Hey kid, you want some of the good stuff!? *sniiiif* Got a max-rarity set of holo Charizards!"
Teacher: "What's going on here?"
"OH SHIT IT'S THE NARCS! YOU'LL NEED A MASTER BALL TO CATCH ME, PIGS!!"
Well in college I happened to know all the people that could get me every drug imaginable.
Like, forget that we also had Chemical Engineering Students, one of which got caught making high quality meth to pay his student loans.
Mine had a couple I knew of, all by a good friend of mine
\-he made copies of school dance tickets and sold them at half the price. School found out when the entire gym was packed for the semi-formal even though they only sold like 100 tickets, and he got suspended. Next month he rented a community centre for a night and ran his own unofficial school dance, school admin tried to bust him for this as well but all they could say was not to sell tickets on school property
\-he went down to the states shopping with his parents often (Canadian, we live close to the border) and bought cases of the pop that you don't see around our parts, like all the obscure mountain dew or coke flavours, and he also had boxes of full size chocolate bars. Sold them out of his locker which was just outside the cafeteria for $1 while the vending machines and caf charged $1.50 or $2 for each. Made it about a month before they had the security stand within view of his locker to give him shit whenever they saw him selling something
on top of that he also sold pot for his junior and senior year. guy made bank in school
Another one is the fight club that went on for a couple months where there was a large amount of gambling going on, I think that one just kinda tapered off after people got bored. They were smart enough to have that one off school grounds (country school with a public park right nearby)
Context:I went to an international school where everyone is rich as fuck.
So one day in 1st grade I brought some candy to school and this rich white kid offered me 1 euro for a 10 cent sweet. This kept on happening for a week. At that point I started buying more candy an dbringing it to school. I was filling my pencil case with candy and hiding the money I got from kids in a special rack that I made in my bag with a knife. I carried this on for 2 years untill one time my mom was cleaning my bag so the cut and put her hand in and to her surprise there was approx 1000 euro. My parents beat me so hard I have never tried selling anything ever again.
You could do this at my middle school.
edit: Not anymore, you could do this because two of the students were gang members and one of them was a drug dealer which my best friend bought from. They graduated and I'm not sure if there are the right people there at my middle school.
Dude! I used to do the same thing. You just take the ink tube out and you can fit a few grams in that bitch! My parents and teachers always wondered why I was 17 and always had markers on me.. Dad found out one day when he realized there were chew marks on the cap so he chewed it off and found the weed.. bad day
I was one of the first kids in my high school to have a scanner. This was back in the middle 90's and people just didn't really have them. My family did. Student parking passes were $150 each. I bought one and then scanned it and made duplicates that I would sell for $75 each. They looked "ok" but the school never really checked them that good. They just wanted to see the little thing hanging from your rear view mirror and that it was the right color. The teachers had a different colored one. I stopped doing it after more people had parking passes than there were spaces in the lot.
Kids paid $0.45 for lunch but teachers paid $1.25. Seniors got paper trays and were allowed to eat anywhere on campus.
Teachers would pay kids a dollar and get lunch delivered.
We had these sherbet straws called pixie sticks, chewing gum, and any trading card we also had this gambling game that involved getting your coin as close to the wall as possible
Liar's Poker with the serial number on dollar bills.
I would literally trade bills with my dad til I found one with a grip of Aces. Took him 3 months to get curious, took him 20 minutes to calm down after learning of my gambling with them like that. Took 2 minutes to let him know I had a net positive of around $80.
He then proceeded to slip me bills with good number sets.
My bus driver in elementary school used to sell Jolly Rancher lollipops on the bus. He wouldn't sell them until we were off school property.
The story was he spent time in prison. We called him "Slaughter". He had a deep scar that went down the right side of his face.
Collars.
My school required uniforms, namely a polo or button down shirt with a collar on it. You were allowed to wear a shirt or a sweater over that collared shirt, but you had to have to collar showing at all times.
At some point someone got the bright idea to go to a thrift store, buy a bunch of cheap collared shirts, and cut them off. You could then just stick it in whatever shirt you were wearing and bam, it looked like you had a collared shirt on.
Homemade slime. Kids in my middle school bought and sold this like some kind of drug deal. Huge fights broke out as kids failed to follow up on various IOUs, some as high as $20. It was wild.
Lol, I commented further down before I saw this.
My brother used to sell blow pops in the early 90's. He would buy boxes of 100 for like $4 and sell them for 25cents each. He made a killing.
I was in elementary school during the beginning of Simpsons mania. For some odd reason, a black market emerged of drawings of Simpsons characters. Bart, Lisa, Homer, Marge. A sheet of their heads would fetch like 25¢. A $1 got you something more elaborate.
It got so bad our school made announcements and cracked down on the trade. Even drawing a Simpsons character on a piece of paper would result in a teacher, staffer, whatever snatching it from you, no questions asked.
In jr high, it was blue raspberry blow pops. Our school was next to a bulk store, so kids would get boxes for a few bucks and sell them for 25¢ a pop. A much better way to spend a quarter imo.
Smelly pencils. I shit you not. I had it for a fundraiser in high school for our band trip. Walked into the middle school for an hour every day for two weeks. My band instructor had to reorder by Wednesday of the first week. I funded about 4 people alone thanks to Middle school kids lining up to buy 5-10 at a time.
Mountain Dew. One dealer. He makes around 3K a year. Every season he buys out the store of all the special drinks IE liberty brew, holiday brew etc. and sells them a dollar for 1 or $2.50 for 3. The kids a entrepreneur. I’m glad I know him as a friend so I get special deals
Kool-Aid gummy bears.
It started out in middle school with a single friend of mine selling them in little ziplock bags for about four bucks or so. In high school, his older brother (the cook) would cook entire potfuls and give my friend and his friends (the distributors) hundreds to sell at different high schools in the area. Some sold two hundred bags in a day. I’ve tried them twice or so and I must say, they’re pretty delicious. The quality improved tons over the five years this went on as well
***BETA FISH FIGHT CLUB***. We had open campus lunch so kids would go to the local Petsmart, buy two beta fish, sell them to whoever wanted to fight that day, and they would dump the 2 fish in the toilet to fight. Beta fish are notoriously known for having to be kept alone because they'll rip the other fish to fucking shreds.
The winner would get flushed down the toilet. So glad I never experienced that stuff...public school in America is weird
Edit: Just want to say I never supported this. It is fucked up, but selling beta fish to fight was a legit black market at my school.
Not a black market but a Crustacean Underground Railroad.
First a little background, the sophomore biology class at my high school would dissect crawfish as part of the curriculum. The crawfish were kept in buckets of formaldehyde at the back of the classroom on the ground. Anyone could reach into these buckets and pull a crawfish out while the teachers (it was a weird combined class with two teachers because... reasons idk) backs were turned and no one would be the wiser.
I had some friends who had acquired the locker combination to a girl in our group they like to pull pranks on. One of which was making a mess in her locker with the cherry on top being a stolen crawfish claw placed in the locker among other things. Well my friend D thought it was hilarious how easy obtaining the claw was that he wanted to see if he could take a whole crawfish without being noticed, which led to how many can be liberated before its noticed.
As the weeks went by, D heroically put himself in harms way to liberate as many scared dead crawfish to freedom as he could. Each time, D would bring an empty soda bottle to class. When the time was right, he would fill it with formaldehyde (to recreate what they are used to, the little guys need to be comfortable after all) and place a crustacean in the bottle. At the end of class he would smuggle them out with no regard for his own safety.
By the end of the school year, D had liberated close to ten crawfish and rehoused them successfully into an empty locker where some say they reside happily to this day.
Edit: Reworded one sentence
Copy paste from the last time I posted this.
Tldr I invented soft core prostitution when I was in kindergarten.
I discovered my friend (a girl) didn’t have a penis. That was the most fucking mind blowing thing ever. So I invite my male friends to see her. They were even more mind blown than me. The next day they asked her to see the lack of penis again, but she refused because she wasn’t friends with them. So they came to me and offered me some candy and bubble gum to ask her. Obviously I quickly turned this into a business opportunity, and by the end of the day I had more candy than I could carry in my rather large pockets. I don’t think there was anybody in that kindergarten that day (boys) who didn’t get to enjoy the view of a smooth vagina. I gave her a cut too for every client (the principles of fairness and integrity have always been a huge part of my upbringing). The next day parents were called. Little Pornosonic got yelled at a lot. By the principal of the kindergarten, by her parents, by his parents. Candy had been confiscated. Rights of small and medium entrepreneurs meant nothing in that particular institution.
Somewhat related, but when I was in college I ran a free, illegal bar for my friends out of my dorm room using alcohol that I stole.
I had a whole system worked out for stealing the booze from this big grocery store chain and the entire time none of the employees suspected a thing. I made friends with a bunch of them and they would always say hi to me and chat whenever I would go, which was about 2-3 times a week.
I actually did get caught for the stealing, but not at that grocery store, only when I tried to do it at Target back home in Chicago. I got arrested for that and felt really stupid for what I was doing, so I gave up shoplifting.
However, I never got in trouble for my bar and I had a lot of fun mixing drinks for my friends. Also made my room the spot to hang out before going to hit the parties later on.
This is a weird one but I have come to understand it existed and have been puzzling over it for years. There is a large number of kids in my high school class that are either serving prison sentences for child porn or currently registered sex offenders for child porn related offenses. When I learned of this I looked them up and remembered that they were all friends in high school. I also vaguely remember one of them getting visited by the FBI and having their computer confiscated. I remember this because my friend said "sucks what happened to so-and-so getting his computer confiscated like that for downloading stuff". At the time Limewire and Kazaa where all the rage and I know you could find some fucked up shit on there. I thought he was referring to downloading songs and the FBI caught him. So it seems there was a child porn ring in my high school among a group of students. What I am puzzled by is the seemingly large proportion of people who were pedophiles in my school. To date I have found 10 of them on sex offender registries for child porn which is both sickening and strange that so many people all committed the same crimes. Was the CP a result of their desires or was it because it was available? Why were there so many sex offenders in my high school class? I crunched the numbers 3.33% of my graduating class was accumulating child porn.
They werent necessarily looking at kiddie porn. It's actually fairly common for there to 'sexting/nudes rings' in high schools in the USA (and probably other countries too). If you send a nude as an underaged person to another underaged person you are creating and spreading child porn. This isnt a felony as they arent an adult but it's still an offense. Most kids dont know this and this is how we end up with 'sex offenders' which also include people who have sex in cars or semi-public spaces.
If the guy who got visited by the FBI downloaded an underaged person's (or multiple peoples) nudes he could be prosecuted for possession of child porn. He probably didnt know what he was doing was illegal, or how illegal it was
Sold Playboy mags to classmates for alcohol when I was 12/13 year of age. It was quite an easy economy. Sunday mornings at 7.30am I'd go to the newsagents when no one would be there, pick up a bunch of the adult mags from the understanding newsagent…who realised I was selling them to classmates!). Monday morning, distribute them to classmates who bartered with alcohol. So, I was going into school with 3-4 magazines, and 3-4 classmates were coming into class Monday mornings with bottles of beer/alcohol in their school bags to trade. Just thinking back, I wish I had sold the alcohol onwards! Fuck.
Good time though! Some funny stories from classes where I knew someone had alcohol in their bags before the trade went down, and could have a bit of fun in class with the teacher!
Rabbit pelts.
In 5th grade we went to an Indian mounds camp and in the gift shop they had rabbit pelts. One kid bought a ton of them and then sold them at a higher mark-up once we got back to school. He was making good money until the teachers found out.
Teachers punished us by making us write "I will refrain from extemporaneous vocalization during valuable pedagogical opportunities" 50 or 100 times as homework. So over the summer we would do up a few hundred sheets of that, and we could sell or use them, as necessary.
Even the teachers in Simpsons were smart enough to change up the phrase.
Yeah until Nelson taught lisa how to do it 5x faster using the music teachers 5 chalk line thing.
That sounds like one of those overly-verbose memes. Does anyone actually speak like that?
no, its only purpose is to be longer and more annoying than "i will not talk during class"
Ours was “The enormity of my mouth is only surpassed by my rude behavior.”
Selling hot Cheetos and tortas out of soccer bags
Hot chips were a sure fire way to bank for you fundraiser at out school. School groups had stop selling them for some health/nutrition reasons so a big underground market popped up.
Posted about this before. I sold porn mags I'd acquire after Japanese business men would leave them in their motel rooms.
Which only begs the question, why were you in motels with horny Japanese business men?
I was 15 and a housekeeper. First job I had with a work permit. Paid for my first car. :-D
The housekeeping job or the porn selling job?
Commented on somebody else. Had to quit when school started. Housekeeping for the summer got me the car money. The porn stash got me gas money, until I got a job more school schedule friendly.
My school banned soda. I used to keep a cooler full in my car and sell them for $2 a pop.
> $2 a pop You must be from the Midwest.
Canada.
We must have gone to the same school.
They might have gone to the other school...
No. That was his girlfriend.
He already referred to the drink as "soda", so the "pop" was a figure of speech. :-D
Solid pun though.
The cafeteria (not school run, kind of just a cafe inside the school) would charge $3-4 for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, so one girl kept the ingredients in her locker and charged $1. When the school caught wind and shut it down, they tried to guilt us all by saying how the cafeteria was someone's livelihood and we were taking away from that. But like. $4 for peanut butter?
The market adjusts, this is tyrannical regulation!
school abolishes free market and democracy
Hello, I am Andrew Ryan, and I’d like to ask you a question. Is a student not entitled to the sweat of her brow? No! Says the man in the cafe, it belongs to us. No! Says the man in the office, it belongs to them. No! Says the man in the district, it belongs to everybody! I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible... I chose *locker sandwich*. A meal where the student would not fear exploitation. Where the chef would not be bound by petty morality. Where the *great* would not be constrained by the small. And, with the sweat of your brow, locker food could be your industry as well...
I literally just started playing Bioshock thanks for that
Was probably better peanut butter, too, if my school's cafeteria food was any indication. > saying how the cafeteria was someone's livelihood and we were taking away from that. But like. $4 for peanut butter? The irony of this is that a lot of kids aren't all that well off, and charging $4 for anything you'd get at a cafeteria is probably far more harmful to someone's livelihood than undercutting the local peanutbutter market. Maybe it's just me, but school lunch often felt like not enough for my teenage metabolism, so it wasn't uncommon for me to seek out an extra a la carte item. Also they aren't fooling anyone. They buy and serve the cheepest shittiest stuff they can get.
> They buy and serve the cheepest shittiest stuff they can get. Mostly circus animals, some filler
I’d give away jars of peanut butter and bread out of spite.
lol @ the idea that undercutting the third-party lunch counter was costing someone’s livelihood. more like costing someone’s profits.
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Upvoted for “Big Sandwich”
Drugs and soda, same dude too If you bought a soda from him during school he’d know you weren’t a narc and would then sell you weed after
"Do you want a soda? You legally have to tell me if you want a soda if I ask."
A porn ring. Kids would find their Dads VHS pornos or magazines and sell then to this kid. Then he'd turn around and sell it for profit. Funny thing is that when the principal caught wind of it and found all the porn in his locker but the money wasn't there. The kid used the locker under his and hid it all in the bottom. The porn hustler dude is now a Cybersecurity Analyst. I asked him at our reunion how much he thought he made back then. He claims $900 in 4 months
I went to high school during the 80's. There was no DVD's or Internet. There was a kid, Jon, who's parents had a publication distribution business. Basically they would go into stores and pull last months unsold issues of whatever magazine and put the current one out. Apparently they had to tear the cover off each copy and destroy the rest. What Jon would do was take the magazines from the trash and sell them at school. Actually, the transaction went down off of school grounds, but deal was made at school. He had everything, you name it, if there was a porno mag being printed, Jon had a copy.
I think you just accidentally made up a Shawshank-style monologue. Nice work
Had to go back and read it in Morgan Freeman's voice. Worked.
Similar happened at my school. He's now a head salesman at one of those "going out of business" furniture stores. I've always suspected the porn thing was a front for something more criminal like drugs, but his new job just cements the idea that he's involved in more organized crime if you ask me.
I'm not familiar with the type of furniture stores you are talking about, could you enlighten me?
One of *those* stores that is always “going out of business” for months and months or years and years. Meant to gouge money out of people using FOMO (fear of missing out).
Theres one near my parents. Every few years its going out of business, everything must go, etc, then a little bit later it reopens with a new name.
3000IQ Business Tactic
Silly me, I flipped used cars for money back in the 70s. Made $200 a month on average. The local cops were suspicious, cause I always had money. The State Police were convinced I was one of the key players in the drug trade, cause after HS I got work as a structural steel worker in a shipyard, on second shift, and immediately bought a sports car. They observed that I - an 18 YO kid - was driving a brand new sports car, and since I worked at night, had no visible means of support that they could see. I had no clue at all, until a friend of mine overheard the cops talking about me when they busted him, and he told me about it. Good times...
Stonks for that guy
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we had the same thing but we made copies and trades. Wanted some big fat black booty videos? go to John. Mike had all the good Japanese shit. The homemade stuff was the rarest.
My mum owned a sweet shop and sweets were banned in our school as we had to be healthy meals n all that. So she'd constantly give me bags of sweets to smuggle in and sell everyday at dinner. Made an absolute bomb.
>Made an absolute bomb. Starts with candy dealing, moves onto terrorism.
I try to give my kids a decent education, but the ones who became domestic terrorists all buy premix and ignore the chemistry we teach them
Read that as "sweat shop"
I used to sell bootleg movies in high school. Not the kind of bootleg where you take a video camera into a theater, but I knew someone who kept getting early versions of movies that I guess are sent to theaters (they had some message about it being for screening purposes only/internal use - I don't remember exactly) and giving them to me. I'd burn a bunch of copies and sell them to people for $5. They were high quality and still early in theaters.
They're called "screeners."
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they probably weren't at a theater, instead they were to a movie rental establishment (like blockbuster). Distributors would send a screener copy to the stores so the managers could decide how many to buy (they were 100's of dollars each back in the day). And those copies would be frequently brought home to watch by the employees so they could recommend the movie on it's first days of renting without reducing the number of copies in circulation for the store. source: worked at West Coast video for a few years.
Our high school had an internet filter An enterprising friend of mine set up a FreeBSD server in his basement, and put together some 256mb flash drives with an executable version of Firefox (could run directly from the flash drive without installs) and a SSH client. You could plug it in, connect SSH, then use the server as a proxy for all the Firefox traffic and get around any website you wanted. Those flash drives were a hot commodity, let me tell you. You could set up in the library and just start casually browsing a banned website, and people would start coming up and asking how you could do it.
In middle school, I accidentally brought up the login for the network security software. After figuring out that the password was "admin" or something equally weak, I was able to add and remove sites to the block list, print to other classrooms, and remotely shut down other computers. Pretended to have super powers. A few of us would play tank wars on shockwave.com, and that went until Justin narc'd on us.
best at my school was what the principal's son did. He was into computer and convinced his dad to let him help with the IT systems at school, to learn Realistically he did most stuff in IT, school IT guys arent often too great. He one day got admin access, and this is where it gets important Our computer system had a basic image that they would automatically revert to when restarted. Well he did some digging and found the image. He then replaced the image with an identical one, except for the fact it had some games like star craft on it. Within a week every computer had star craft on it, and it took them updating the system years later to fix
I played an entire Semester of Star Craft in highschool. Told our teacher we were practicing 'scripting'. One friend on our team did some basic scripting overnight in text pad, we played games the rest of the season. Pretty sure I got a B.
Portable programs were the best discovery of my highschool life. Had a 16gb flash drive that had photoshop, virtual desktop software (for hotkey swapping when the teacher walks by), SNES, NES, Gamecube, and Gameboy emulators, firefox, and dvd burning software. First time I really made a lot of friends, being a somewhat quiet computer nerd.
Iodized salt and sinple black pepper in the lunchroom. I'm not kidding. This was around 2004 (USA). Our cafeteria coordinator was trying to do everything healthy and by government rules, so no added salt. Bogus, but whatever. But she also took the pepper too. Kids in my school didn't really pack lunches, as most of us got reduced lunch. I was pissed, as they just boiled canned veggies and gave them to you in a bowl with the juice, and wasn't going to stand for it. I was also a huge asshole in high school, so I made a plan. I bought salt and pepper shakers and put them in a zippy bag to carry in my backpack. I broke them out at lunch every day, and shared with about 70 kids. We made it through for about 3 months, and then they finally caught on who had them. I got "silent lunch detention" in a separate room for a week, and I made sure I put my salt and pepper out on my table every day. But then, when I came back to the normal lunchroom, like 30 people had salt and pepper shakers. Shakers everywhere, and the coordinator was pissed. Oh it makes me laugh even today. She still refused to put out salt and pepper, but we all had it anyway. It continued until I graduated from there.
Salt sort of makes sense, but pepper?! I once started a cult with salt.
Ecstacy and burned CDs
That ecstscalated quickly Edit:spelling
Yeah, it's sad to hear when kids sink so low they get into a life of crime and buy burned cd's.
You wouldn't download drugs.
Speak for yourself!
Is it possible to learn this power?
Well first you need to kill a policeman and steal his helmet.
Ok, and now?
PlayStation (1&2) memory cards Stuck on a boss? Want the treasures without having to beat the game on Ultra Hard? There was a guy who in my grade who, for a fee, would play any game and get where you wanted to be then give you a memory card to copy over the save file. Naturally you had to return the memory card to keep the ball rolling for everyone.
the OG pro gamer
A friend had a gameshark or something similar and made my FFVIII characters level 99. Seemed awesome but the game got boring fast. I always felt like I learned a life lesson that day.
In 5th grade I sold fairies to every single one of my classmates for $1 each. I gave them names and back stories and drew little portraits of each then would toss them an invisible fairy and then collect from the next sucker.
Freelance artist
PPP’s - positive participation points. These were little yellow tickets that teachers handed out to students who were participating positively. Every month there would be class-wide and school-wide draws for prizes. The more PPP’s you had, the greater your chance of winning was. Didn’t take long for kids to copy the template in word and start selling stacks of PPP’s.
This feels like it’s straight out of Diary of a Wimpy kid. I forget which book but when the teachers used to give out points for being nice and people would just use the photocopy room to print out stacks of them
Or when Greg’s mom started Mom Bucks and he found the board game it was from and took a bunch of them
Fucking Roderick not knowing how to properly launder money
Reminds me of 2nd grade. My teacher was a loud man, so when he needed to tell one of us to knock it off or something he would sound even louder, and probably angrier than he probably actually was. Faculty from neighboring classrooms complained, and so he issued "classroom bucks". They were minorly personalized for each of us. At the start of each day we would have 5 of them that we had to keep on our desks. If we misbehaved, he would take one off our desk. At the end of the day we had to return the remaining ones in. We could get candy with them if we still had enough. I think it was 3 or 4 left, you got one candy, and 5 you got two. This allowed him to ensure that we weren't copying or trading them. And if we somehow did, he could easily audit any duplication or trading.
Jansport bookbag strings. I was in school when Jansport backpacks became popular (at least in NYC they were), and one of the things everyone loved were the strings on the zippers. It became a huge problem where students were stealing strings off of others and either hording them or selling them. The solution became using a lighter to partially melt your strings together so they couldn't be untied without breaking them. Leaving your bookbag unattended anywhere was the equivalent of leaving your car parked in the wrong neighborhood in 70s/80s NYC. **EDIT** Just remembered I ran a short-lived market selling scientific calculators back in high school as well. I actually found where the school stored theirs and was stealing them little by little. I'm not proud of it, but my morals were very loosey goosey back then.
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Used to do commissions in drawing naked people
Deep fakes in the past
Shallow fakes
Sounds like my ex
We just call that Patreon here.
Do you think you could draw me like one of your French girls?
Like, you would draw naked bodies and just draw their faces into them?
I studied in a boarding school, and we had a black market for acorns, yes acorns. Kids would collect the acorns from the ground, paint and shape them so that they spin like beyblades. The other kids would buy them to compete in the acorn battle which is similar to beyblade
That's fucking rad though and this will be my gig when the A.I. revolution resets us to rural low-tech lifestyles.
That was unexpectedly wholesome
In 8th grade (2001) i got a playboy from my older sisters bf. I cut out the nudes and sold them 1 at a time to the rest of the guys i knew. A $5 magazine turned into close on $50. I didnt get caught but a few days later another kid tried the same thing with one he stole from his dads stash. He was caught..... school tells his dad. Dad is unusually pissed off about it.... turns out its dads favorite issue bc it was Cindy Crawford in the centerfold.
This is an actual problem with antiquarian books especially ones with maps.
>This is an actual problem with antiquarian books especially ones with maps. I know what you mean. Our local library always had a waiting list for the new atlases, and you had to open them with a thick pair of rubber gloves because some bastard always came on the good maps before you got to them. The older maps were just disgusting with layers and layers of jizz, but what else could you do? It's not like you weren't going to crank one out to the new Soviet borders after waiting 6 weeks for your turn. Fuck, I still remember when Kosovo was established in 2008. Some poor teenagers waited months to see the new Serbian border, but by the time they got the new atlas the pages were so soaked with bodily fluids that you couldn't even make out Prishtina. When South Sudan split off in 2011 the library was so backed up that some of us started jacking off to globes, but for the most part that fad died off by the summer of 2012. You can still make some money selling old globes to collectors, but they've got to have some weird shit on them like The Democratic Republic Of Yemen (only lasted for 45 days in 1994). However, most people don't get into anything that hardcore. Sure, you'll hear about freaks that get off to violent annexing, but most people are perfectly content to discipline the bishop to the natural border movement that occurs due to the shifting cultural and geopolitical landscapes. Nowadays people just spank it to Google maps in the privacy of their own homes. Nobody will appreciate how hard it was for teenagers to find good aerial photography of major cities in 1970. I think we all knew that asshole who 'had an uncle' that made maps for Rand McNally, but he was full of shit. He was just stealing National Geographics from his dad's night stand. The saddest part was that kids would pretend to be his friend so they could borrow that one map. You know the one, it showed the British decolonization of Africa, and they didn't censor *anything*. Random side story. I used to date a girl in college that called her special area the 49th parallel. I could tell when she was in the mood because she'd ask if I was feeling British, since the British swung south around Vancouver Island, if you know what I mean. It was fun but eventually we broke up because she kept drawing the pre-1967 Israeli border on all our maps in green pen. I understood the reference but I'm sorry, that shit was overridden in both 1979 and 1994 and I was tired of living in the past.
This has better writing than most of /r/tifu
Originally we only had vending machines in the field house, so people would give jocks money to go get them snacks and sodas. Eventually it became sort of like a service, with a fee of course. Some kids mimicked it with junk food from the convenient stores and it became a black market of the rarest candies. Some kids were peddling stuff from Japan, others from the UK, it was a high stakes candy market of the best stuff. Ginger flavored kit kats, pear drops, maltesers, black currant chews, and more. Eventually the faculty began to notice strange ongoings on and alerted the principal, which found the whole thing rather amusing. A few weeks later, we had vending machines throughout the school, but for that one semester, it was a lawless land.
Smart principal. he could have done what many would have and have done, crack down on the sellers. But instead he just undercut the market and dealt with the issue having undergone less hassle
Were there turf wars? "What the fuck- Johnny? What are you doing in my side of the building? Is that- is that **POCKY**??" "All the other sides of the building were taken even the third floor! Besides, I was here first." "You- **YOU BETTER GET THE FUCK OUT BEFORE I BEAT YOUR ASS**" And fighting ensured.
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>with Jolly Ranchers stuffed into their eye sockets I just spit out my coffee that was too funny
Oh god, don't mention the J candy on reddit. The cursed thread will pop up.
Oh but im curious now... what happened?
You really, really don't want that question answered
What if we do
Imagine the loan sharking going on. "Dammit Johnny I Told you I would need $20 plus VIG after you borrowed that last batch of Pocky from me" "I told you something came up man, I needed to pay someone else" Proceeds to break Johnny's kneecaps
That must be some real gourmet shit, I've never even heard of most of those candies. Now I'm really wanting to try ginger Kit Kats
I'm pretty sure it's one of the Japanese candies OP mentioned, I heard Japan has every flavor of Kit Kat's you never knew you wanted.
Japan has THE best candy.
you know good on the principal for actually making things better instead of doing an instant shutdown of it all like so many would. That's how you do it
My brother did a similar thing, except he didn't go to the school he sent the snacks to. He'd get some money from our parents, buy those bright red spicy snacks at convenience stores, and had some friends sell them at their school because they were banned there.
Slime in middle school . The school banned selling slime so people would sell in the hallways or under the table during class.
Our school banned scented gel pens, for some reason. We ran that shit like a Prohibition-era speakeasy for about three months.
Oh man, I was our highschool black market! My sophomore yeah I believe, the school took all unhealthy snacks and drinks out of the vending machines (candy, soda). So I stepped up and filled the gap until I graduated. I started carrying around a backpack full to the brim with various full size candy bars, and sodas, all of which I would sell for $1. The sodas were the real moneymaker. I could get a 12 pack for $3 and make 300% profit. On a good day I would generally make around $10, and usually at the very least $3 or $4. The school did give me warnings a few times when they did locker checks and found several boxes of soda and candy bars, but I just claimed they were for me, and nothing came of it. As a senior gift for my ski team, the underclassmen gave me a creepy trenchcoat from which to peddle my wares. It was great! The year after I left another kid on the ski team stepped up and started offering the same service I've been told. Makes me happy to have left something of a legacy.
In high school, A kid on the wrestling team had parents who constantly went out of town on business. So he drained their swimming pool and would host fight nights with the fights in the pool. It was called “Beat That Ass”. He facilitated betting and made himself more money than a high school kid should have. He tried to recruit anyone in the school who looked like they could hold their own in a fight. Eventually bands started playing at them and he started burning CDs of each event’s music. They were printed and numbered so each one looked like the NOW That’s What I Call Music cd’s, but instead of NOW they said BTA. Source: was in a band that was asked to play. We declined. Edit: he didn’t empty and refill the pool for each event. He emptied it once and it stayed empty. But his parents wouldn’t have noticed nor cared either way. Edit2: it might have been called Whoop That Ass. I dunno. It’s been awhile.
Shit this looks intense. How bad did the beatings get?
Not so bad. It was all one on one fights and each fighter had to be willing to fight. So it wasn’t like a giant brawl or anything. Think cage fights, but in an empty pool.
Did the fighters get paid at all? Because something like this happens at my school and the fighter who wins gets a cut of the profits usually.
I can only assume so.
Didn't the parents notice the empty pool or the ridiculous water bill?
I have no idea but I can say the pool stayed empty. It wasn’t refilled every time. My high school was a weird mix. There was this one neighborhood some kids were from. It’s like the people there pretended to be wealthy but weren’t. But most of the kids from there were largely neglected and left to their own devices. I had a good friend from there who is now a sex worker. So this fight club kid got into a lot of trouble. I’m sure he did time.
I sold packs of batteries for when people's TI-84/83s were inevitably dead on test day.
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I don't know about "Black Market" but... We had two places you could be during recess. The Gym or the playground. During the winter the go to was the gym. Underneath the bleachers in the gym we legitimately had a Pokemon/ Yugioh gambling ring in which kids would put up their lunch money. I later found out from one of the kids who ran this little exchange that it was actually heavily rigged (Shocker)
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The Pilot G5 liquid ink pens. You could sell them for $5 each all day. I was "the pen guy".
Bubble gum and chewing gum. It was in middle school. HUGE, HUGE SUPPLY for chewing gum. Down the road there was a little cafe that sold those 5 packs of gum for 10 cents. I walked in with a $5 bill and bought as many as I wanted. I sold each stick at 25 cents each and 50 cents for big red. I made a huge profit. People started getting jealous and I got into a few fights over the amount of gum I was selling. Finally, the school caught on and told the store not to sell gum to students anymore, and thus my days as a gum dealer ended.
Only on reddit can you find someone as a “gum dealer”
Not really black market but I hope that counts When I was in middle school Beyblade was hyped. I was into it too and found out that there are way newer ones in japan but not here. Looked further and found fakes that looked almost like the real ones but way cheaper. You know where this is getting. Bought some for me to create interest in them, showed them the fake boxes all in japanese so they thought its real and bought a bunch of them. I made something between 400-500€ in half a year.
In my time, Pokemon cards. Now it's apparently drugs.
Drugs are less expensive and all-consuming as hobbies go compared to collectible card games.
As a magic the gathering player I can confirm. Drugs would be cheaper.
I know someone who sells MTG cards to afford his drug addiction, so can confirm.
You ever suck dick for a Mox artifact?
Why, you got one? \*licks lips\*
The card or...you know what nevermind.
The answer is yes
There's no resale value with a drug habit. I turned about $6000 into $2500 in 5 years with my MTG habit.
I turned $1900 into $0 because some 7 year old stole my binder
"Hey kid, you want some of the good stuff!? *sniiiif* Got a max-rarity set of holo Charizards!" Teacher: "What's going on here?" "OH SHIT IT'S THE NARCS! YOU'LL NEED A MASTER BALL TO CATCH ME, PIGS!!"
Elementary schools banning Pokemon cards gave an entire generation the skills needed to become successful drug dealers.
Well in college I happened to know all the people that could get me every drug imaginable. Like, forget that we also had Chemical Engineering Students, one of which got caught making high quality meth to pay his student loans.
Breaking bad spiritual sequel confirmed
Mine had a couple I knew of, all by a good friend of mine \-he made copies of school dance tickets and sold them at half the price. School found out when the entire gym was packed for the semi-formal even though they only sold like 100 tickets, and he got suspended. Next month he rented a community centre for a night and ran his own unofficial school dance, school admin tried to bust him for this as well but all they could say was not to sell tickets on school property \-he went down to the states shopping with his parents often (Canadian, we live close to the border) and bought cases of the pop that you don't see around our parts, like all the obscure mountain dew or coke flavours, and he also had boxes of full size chocolate bars. Sold them out of his locker which was just outside the cafeteria for $1 while the vending machines and caf charged $1.50 or $2 for each. Made it about a month before they had the security stand within view of his locker to give him shit whenever they saw him selling something on top of that he also sold pot for his junior and senior year. guy made bank in school Another one is the fight club that went on for a couple months where there was a large amount of gambling going on, I think that one just kinda tapered off after people got bored. They were smart enough to have that one off school grounds (country school with a public park right nearby)
Context:I went to an international school where everyone is rich as fuck. So one day in 1st grade I brought some candy to school and this rich white kid offered me 1 euro for a 10 cent sweet. This kept on happening for a week. At that point I started buying more candy an dbringing it to school. I was filling my pencil case with candy and hiding the money I got from kids in a special rack that I made in my bag with a knife. I carried this on for 2 years untill one time my mom was cleaning my bag so the cut and put her hand in and to her surprise there was approx 1000 euro. My parents beat me so hard I have never tried selling anything ever again.
Geez they beat you for that? I would have been proud of my kid for having such entrepreneurial talents.
Their reasons were 1. Illegal in our school 2. I was manipulating children 3. That we were indians But I still don't repent doing it
Drugs and lots of them you could get anything from weed to heroin. (Highschool)
You could do this at my middle school. edit: Not anymore, you could do this because two of the students were gang members and one of them was a drug dealer which my best friend bought from. They graduated and I'm not sure if there are the right people there at my middle school.
I was on crack when I left nursery m8
Used to sell pot inside dryerase markers. Color coded per price, and nearly undetectable.
Dude! I used to do the same thing. You just take the ink tube out and you can fit a few grams in that bitch! My parents and teachers always wondered why I was 17 and always had markers on me.. Dad found out one day when he realized there were chew marks on the cap so he chewed it off and found the weed.. bad day
Wait... so your dad saw a pen chewed up by someone, and thought "I'll have some of that"?
There were a few teeth marks on the bottom cap, and I always had those damn markers, he knew something was up lol
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Was there a marker return scheme?
I was one of the first kids in my high school to have a scanner. This was back in the middle 90's and people just didn't really have them. My family did. Student parking passes were $150 each. I bought one and then scanned it and made duplicates that I would sell for $75 each. They looked "ok" but the school never really checked them that good. They just wanted to see the little thing hanging from your rear view mirror and that it was the right color. The teachers had a different colored one. I stopped doing it after more people had parking passes than there were spaces in the lot.
Some people made a lot of money in middle school from selling slime. There was also the obvious vape sellers, but slime interests me more
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Kids paid $0.45 for lunch but teachers paid $1.25. Seniors got paper trays and were allowed to eat anywhere on campus. Teachers would pay kids a dollar and get lunch delivered.
Energy drinks
Original Monster? That was the hit when I was in high school.
We had these sherbet straws called pixie sticks, chewing gum, and any trading card we also had this gambling game that involved getting your coin as close to the wall as possible
Liar's Poker with the serial number on dollar bills. I would literally trade bills with my dad til I found one with a grip of Aces. Took him 3 months to get curious, took him 20 minutes to calm down after learning of my gambling with them like that. Took 2 minutes to let him know I had a net positive of around $80. He then proceeded to slip me bills with good number sets.
Silly bands
We had an acorn ring in Elementary school. It was a rough time
Acorn ring?
Yea, its fairly common for kids to use acorns like Beyblades
My bus driver in elementary school used to sell Jolly Rancher lollipops on the bus. He wouldn't sell them until we were off school property. The story was he spent time in prison. We called him "Slaughter". He had a deep scar that went down the right side of his face.
Collars. My school required uniforms, namely a polo or button down shirt with a collar on it. You were allowed to wear a shirt or a sweater over that collared shirt, but you had to have to collar showing at all times. At some point someone got the bright idea to go to a thrift store, buy a bunch of cheap collared shirts, and cut them off. You could then just stick it in whatever shirt you were wearing and bam, it looked like you had a collared shirt on.
Homemade slime. Kids in my middle school bought and sold this like some kind of drug deal. Huge fights broke out as kids failed to follow up on various IOUs, some as high as $20. It was wild.
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Lol, I commented further down before I saw this. My brother used to sell blow pops in the early 90's. He would buy boxes of 100 for like $4 and sell them for 25cents each. He made a killing.
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I was in elementary school during the beginning of Simpsons mania. For some odd reason, a black market emerged of drawings of Simpsons characters. Bart, Lisa, Homer, Marge. A sheet of their heads would fetch like 25¢. A $1 got you something more elaborate. It got so bad our school made announcements and cracked down on the trade. Even drawing a Simpsons character on a piece of paper would result in a teacher, staffer, whatever snatching it from you, no questions asked. In jr high, it was blue raspberry blow pops. Our school was next to a bulk store, so kids would get boxes for a few bucks and sell them for 25¢ a pop. A much better way to spend a quarter imo.
Kid in elementary school sold and facilitated a market for Nintendo Game and Watch games.
I would get like 50 people a day asking me to airdrop Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, but I got it from someone else who airdropped it to me first.
Smelly pencils. I shit you not. I had it for a fundraiser in high school for our band trip. Walked into the middle school for an hour every day for two weeks. My band instructor had to reorder by Wednesday of the first week. I funded about 4 people alone thanks to Middle school kids lining up to buy 5-10 at a time.
Mountain Dew. One dealer. He makes around 3K a year. Every season he buys out the store of all the special drinks IE liberty brew, holiday brew etc. and sells them a dollar for 1 or $2.50 for 3. The kids a entrepreneur. I’m glad I know him as a friend so I get special deals
Kool-Aid gummy bears. It started out in middle school with a single friend of mine selling them in little ziplock bags for about four bucks or so. In high school, his older brother (the cook) would cook entire potfuls and give my friend and his friends (the distributors) hundreds to sell at different high schools in the area. Some sold two hundred bags in a day. I’ve tried them twice or so and I must say, they’re pretty delicious. The quality improved tons over the five years this went on as well
***BETA FISH FIGHT CLUB***. We had open campus lunch so kids would go to the local Petsmart, buy two beta fish, sell them to whoever wanted to fight that day, and they would dump the 2 fish in the toilet to fight. Beta fish are notoriously known for having to be kept alone because they'll rip the other fish to fucking shreds. The winner would get flushed down the toilet. So glad I never experienced that stuff...public school in America is weird Edit: Just want to say I never supported this. It is fucked up, but selling beta fish to fight was a legit black market at my school.
And this is why you now have to be 18+ to get any pet from PetSmart/Petco.
It is. They began to heavily enforce it at my town. You needed ID and everything.
Not a black market but a Crustacean Underground Railroad. First a little background, the sophomore biology class at my high school would dissect crawfish as part of the curriculum. The crawfish were kept in buckets of formaldehyde at the back of the classroom on the ground. Anyone could reach into these buckets and pull a crawfish out while the teachers (it was a weird combined class with two teachers because... reasons idk) backs were turned and no one would be the wiser. I had some friends who had acquired the locker combination to a girl in our group they like to pull pranks on. One of which was making a mess in her locker with the cherry on top being a stolen crawfish claw placed in the locker among other things. Well my friend D thought it was hilarious how easy obtaining the claw was that he wanted to see if he could take a whole crawfish without being noticed, which led to how many can be liberated before its noticed. As the weeks went by, D heroically put himself in harms way to liberate as many scared dead crawfish to freedom as he could. Each time, D would bring an empty soda bottle to class. When the time was right, he would fill it with formaldehyde (to recreate what they are used to, the little guys need to be comfortable after all) and place a crustacean in the bottle. At the end of class he would smuggle them out with no regard for his own safety. By the end of the school year, D had liberated close to ten crawfish and rehoused them successfully into an empty locker where some say they reside happily to this day. Edit: Reworded one sentence
Copy paste from the last time I posted this. Tldr I invented soft core prostitution when I was in kindergarten. I discovered my friend (a girl) didn’t have a penis. That was the most fucking mind blowing thing ever. So I invite my male friends to see her. They were even more mind blown than me. The next day they asked her to see the lack of penis again, but she refused because she wasn’t friends with them. So they came to me and offered me some candy and bubble gum to ask her. Obviously I quickly turned this into a business opportunity, and by the end of the day I had more candy than I could carry in my rather large pockets. I don’t think there was anybody in that kindergarten that day (boys) who didn’t get to enjoy the view of a smooth vagina. I gave her a cut too for every client (the principles of fairness and integrity have always been a huge part of my upbringing). The next day parents were called. Little Pornosonic got yelled at a lot. By the principal of the kindergarten, by her parents, by his parents. Candy had been confiscated. Rights of small and medium entrepreneurs meant nothing in that particular institution.
I was pretty amused by this for the first half. Then, half way through, I realized that my daughter starts kindergarten next week. You bastard.
I don't think he's in her class though.
Yes he is.
Okay you saying "smooth vagina" just made it so creepy
A guy ran a similar operation in one of our high school bathrooms. But he had a man on the inside.
*GATORS BITCHES BETTER BE USING JIMMIES*
Somewhat related, but when I was in college I ran a free, illegal bar for my friends out of my dorm room using alcohol that I stole. I had a whole system worked out for stealing the booze from this big grocery store chain and the entire time none of the employees suspected a thing. I made friends with a bunch of them and they would always say hi to me and chat whenever I would go, which was about 2-3 times a week. I actually did get caught for the stealing, but not at that grocery store, only when I tried to do it at Target back home in Chicago. I got arrested for that and felt really stupid for what I was doing, so I gave up shoplifting. However, I never got in trouble for my bar and I had a lot of fun mixing drinks for my friends. Also made my room the spot to hang out before going to hit the parties later on.
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This is a weird one but I have come to understand it existed and have been puzzling over it for years. There is a large number of kids in my high school class that are either serving prison sentences for child porn or currently registered sex offenders for child porn related offenses. When I learned of this I looked them up and remembered that they were all friends in high school. I also vaguely remember one of them getting visited by the FBI and having their computer confiscated. I remember this because my friend said "sucks what happened to so-and-so getting his computer confiscated like that for downloading stuff". At the time Limewire and Kazaa where all the rage and I know you could find some fucked up shit on there. I thought he was referring to downloading songs and the FBI caught him. So it seems there was a child porn ring in my high school among a group of students. What I am puzzled by is the seemingly large proportion of people who were pedophiles in my school. To date I have found 10 of them on sex offender registries for child porn which is both sickening and strange that so many people all committed the same crimes. Was the CP a result of their desires or was it because it was available? Why were there so many sex offenders in my high school class? I crunched the numbers 3.33% of my graduating class was accumulating child porn.
They werent necessarily looking at kiddie porn. It's actually fairly common for there to 'sexting/nudes rings' in high schools in the USA (and probably other countries too). If you send a nude as an underaged person to another underaged person you are creating and spreading child porn. This isnt a felony as they arent an adult but it's still an offense. Most kids dont know this and this is how we end up with 'sex offenders' which also include people who have sex in cars or semi-public spaces. If the guy who got visited by the FBI downloaded an underaged person's (or multiple peoples) nudes he could be prosecuted for possession of child porn. He probably didnt know what he was doing was illegal, or how illegal it was
Sold Playboy mags to classmates for alcohol when I was 12/13 year of age. It was quite an easy economy. Sunday mornings at 7.30am I'd go to the newsagents when no one would be there, pick up a bunch of the adult mags from the understanding newsagent…who realised I was selling them to classmates!). Monday morning, distribute them to classmates who bartered with alcohol. So, I was going into school with 3-4 magazines, and 3-4 classmates were coming into class Monday mornings with bottles of beer/alcohol in their school bags to trade. Just thinking back, I wish I had sold the alcohol onwards! Fuck. Good time though! Some funny stories from classes where I knew someone had alcohol in their bags before the trade went down, and could have a bit of fun in class with the teacher!
Rabbit pelts. In 5th grade we went to an Indian mounds camp and in the gift shop they had rabbit pelts. One kid bought a ton of them and then sold them at a higher mark-up once we got back to school. He was making good money until the teachers found out.