What Is Your First Memory Of Money?

[Almighty Colin]

What is your very first memory of money? Does it tell you anything about who you are or who you have become?


When I was in first grade, a girl in my class only had 6 cents and milk was 7 cents. I gave her a penny. Because of this, I thought of myself as a good person. At the end of year, my teacher gave me a grade of "Needs Improvement" for "Shares with Others". I told her the story and said that not everyone shares and needs to be seen by the teacher doing it. I told her that I thought kids that did nice things only to be seen by the teacher were probably not really that nice anyway. I then asked that she changed my grade. She did not.

[Winetalk.com]

My first lesson about money, business, covenants and promisses was given to me in the first grade by Andrei Grigoriev.

He had a knife, knife to die for,
the knife russian paratroupers used to cut strings,
the one which comes out when you push a button.

I wanted it really bad and finally he promissed to sell it to me at $5,
if I could raise them in 1 week.

My daily allowance was 10 cents a day,
so by all means I had to come up with $4.50 cents rather quick.

..and I did,
I started selling my sister's stamps collection, borrowed a few dollars from close friends and in a week I had the magical number, $5.

To my big surprise, the fucker told me that he didn't anticipate for me to come up wiht the money and won't sell it anyway, because the knife wasn't really his.

I learned a valuable lessons:
1) raising money is possible if you put your mind to it

2) selling stamps was a good business, I started my own collection and even brought a few to USA (smuggled them)

3) NEVER trust anybody's good intentions or promisses,
most likely they can't keep them.

Where are you, Andriusha?
The lessons you served me did me good
;-))

[Almighty Colin]

Serge,

That's a great story with strong lessons. I hope to read more of other people's as the day goes on.

P.S. Did your sister know you were selling her stamps?

[Winetalk.com]

Originally posted by Colin@Nov 24 2002, 07:03 AM


P.S. Did your sister know you were selling her stamps?

she went bezerk when she found out,
hit me in the nose
(she is 7 years older than me)
bloodied it and gave me another lesson in life:
"Thou shall not steal"
;-)))

[Vick]

Maybe not my first memory of money but one of my first

about 7 years of age my Grandfather built me a shoe shine box and I started shining shoes of the men in the neighborhood and at my great grandfather's bait and tackle shop.
My Great Grandfather paid me a quarter to shine his shoes, one of the men who worked for him paid me fifty cents to shine his shoes and told my Great Grandfather he was cheap and should pay me fifty cents too. I still didn't get the quarter raise per shoe shine from my Great Grandfather

At Christmas year before last my Grandfather gave me a very special present .......... he had found the shoe shine box he built me 30 years ago and gave it to me for Christmas ..... it now sits in my office with a sign that reads "Your First Business Venture"



Last edited by Vick at Nov 24 2002, 08:19 AM

[Winetalk.com]

Originally posted by Vick@Nov 24 2002, 08:18 AM
Maybe not my first memory of money but one of my first

about 7 years of age my Grandfather built me a shoe shine box and I started shining shoes of the men in the neighborhood and at my great grandfather's bait and tackle shop.
My Great Grandfather paid me a quarter to shine his shoes, one of the men who worked for him paid me fifty cents to shine his shoes and told my Great Grandfather he was cheap and should pay me fifty cents too. I still didn't get the quarter raise per shoe shine from my Great Grandfather

At Christmas year before last my Grandfather gave me a very special present .......... he had found the shoe shine box he built me 30 years ago and gave it to me for Christmas ..... it now sits in my office with a sign that reads "Your First Business Venture"

I think I know WHY he paid you quarter, while his employee paid you 50 cents...

I learned another charecter of human nature when I was working in car service in Hassidic part of Brooklyn,
Boro Park.

I had a fair to Manhattan, 47th Street,
diamond district,
getting one of the owners to work,
$12.50 trip, with...25 cents tip.

The other customer of mine was going to Nursing home,
$6 fair with...$2! tips.

both Jews, both religious,
so the "heritage" wasn't any different,
and I asked myself WHY?

I think I got the right answer, which was later on confirmed by other people who witnessed the similar phenomena-
the richer the person, the smaller the tip.

Rich people don't have to proof to the world that they are reach, and quite self confident,
and it's a poor ones who feel better about themselves by leaving big tips,
making bigger donations to Red Cross than their rich neigbors...

human nature at it's best.

Have anybody witnessed this phenomena themselves?

[Almighty Colin]

Serge,

I know someone worth many, many millions that tips very large %.

I don't know enough examples for comparison.

Vick, that's cool.

When I was eight years old I got a job at the local
cattle auction, in a little town in central Kansas. I
was better than a dog, I could run like hell, open gates
and follow orders...so I got a man's wages (I had to get a social security card)(there were men raising families on these wages). I worked two
days a week and soon was getting rich (this was in the
days of 5 cent cokes and 15 cent movies). I kept my money
in postal savings, but the local PostMistress got mad at me
when I kept taking money out and putting money in, so she
sent me down to the local bank. The bank President opened
a checking account for me and showed me how to write checks.

So, I went around writing 15 cent and 25 cent checks. I never
considered it unusual for an eight year old to have a bank account,
and none of the local businesses ever refused my checks. I even gave
a check to my cousins on their birthday and explained to them how
to go to the bank to cash it. I paid the grade school for my lunches
with a check.

I have had my own checking account since....and I still probably have the money I made when I was eight.

[Winetalk.com]

Originally posted by kid@Nov 24 2002, 10:10 AM
....and I still probably have the money I made when I was eight.

play stock market and you won't
;-))

I thought the same thing to myself not long ago, because I was never thinking of becoming a businessman when I was in high school, it was something I kind of fell into. I always figured I'd become a teacher and a writer, like the rest of my family.

When I was in 3rd grade there was a local charity called Heifer Project (it's still around today) that allowed you to donate money which was symbolically converted into animals. For example, if you gave the Project $50 you could get a sheep, or something like that, and send it to a country of your choice. They sent animals to developing countries with instructors to teach the natives how to use/farm with the resources more efficiently.

Anyhow, I decided one day that I wanted to raise money for this charity, I have no idea why. So I took some collection boxes that were handed out at my school before by another charity, UNICEF. I covered them with paper and wrote Heifer Project on them, and every day at lunch for a couple weeks I'd go around to the other students and collect dimes nickels and quarters. I recruited 2 or 3 other students to help me as well.

At the end of 2 weeks I had $60 in donations, so I donated some honey bees to some African country. The faculty was so impressed (public school) that the principal made an announcement thanking everyone who had contributed over the loudspeaker in the morning.

I also did things as a kid like shoveling horse manure, selling our family's home made wildflower honey at a local corn stand, and cleaning the house to earn cash. I never had an 'allowance' I had to work for it every week. I usually squandered the money I got and didn't save it, but I suppose one lesson out of two ain't bad.

C.

[*KK*]

LOL Serge -- tipping well is a sign of appreciation, not of being rich... if the service is good. Tipping well for bad service is foolish. Of course I spent a few years bartending and waiting tables in school, and everyone with an expense account tips better, that I can tell you

Not my first memory of money, but one of my fonder thoughts about it --
If you took all the money in the world and parceled it out equally to all its' inhabitants, it wouldn't take long for the haves to have it again and the have nots to be broke.

[Mutt]

my first memory of money was selling Creep Peeple's on the street.
If anybody remembers them it it was a toy, hell it was more than a toy,
it was a machine that had moulds that you poured color goop in and you'd bake it and out would come these rubbery troll like creepy peeple. You could put the Creepy Peeple heads on the end of a pencil. So my dad gave me some boxes of new pencils and i sold them with Creepy Peeple on the ends of them, i sold a ton of them, made like 7 or 8 bucks which was a lot of cash back then.

There was also the ThingMaker, made glow in the dark stuff.

i dunno if parents today would let kids have one of those things, i was 7 and the machine got hot as hell, you could burn yourself easily.

[Lisa]

My first memory of money was swallowing the 3c change the milkman had left on the doorstep when I was 3. Two coins...a 1c and a 2c...didn't tell my mother till I was bout 16.

[slavdogg]

i think i was a businessman ever since i was little.
before age 10 i used to buy. sell trade stamps.
What i consider my first business transaction was when i was 10. My dad was a photographer and was selling photographs of famous American actors for like $2, but he would give them to me for free. One day i realised i could sell them to my friends for like $1.50, so one day when he was away i sold my whole collection at $1.50 each. At age 10 i was so proud of myself, until i told my dad lol

i could go on and on about all the money making ventures i had when i was in my teens...

My dad was the only one that ever gave me support for all the biz ventures i had.
So this year for Father's Day i bought him a Rolex (with ARS points)
.. I also bought my parents a condo few months earlier.


I never though about going into business, until i got my 6 cents check from IEG. Looking back at it, i guess i was natural at it.



Last edited by slavdogg at Nov 25 2002, 02:34 AM

[HoneyBlond]

I had my first job, a paper run when I was 10, I had to pretend to be a boy
as there was no such thing as a papergirl back then.
I want to be independant and had figured out that if I had my own money
my parents could not stop me doing what I wanted to do..hhmmm

For fundraising for extra curricular activities I would organise a group of my friends and we would wash cars in the local service stations on a Sat Morning, our parents were impressed, less $$ they had to cough up

I had a part time Job Friday Nite / Saturday Morning Job at Coles by the time I turned 12 ( I had to be a little creative about my age of course )
I used to trade stamps, and lease the use of my bike, guitar, horse, homework or clothes. Gee I miss those days.. *sigh*

[Almighty Colin]

What's up with all the stamps? I collected stamps but was much more of a coin collector and then sports cards. None of my relatives ever accidently sent me an upside down plane on a birthday card envelope but i kept looking anyway. To this day, I still have the habit of looking at my change for a 1955 double-die. Whatever that is worth, I thought it a fortune when I was 9 years old. I bought the new price guides every year and looked for the most expensive coins and always kept an eye out.

My father was responsible for keeping a Coke machine stocked and he let me look through the change and buy anything I wanted. Lots of wheat pennies, a few mercury dimes and buffalo nickels, a Franklin 50 cent piece and once even a standing liberty quarter. At the time, I figured some kids must have been raiding their dad's coin collections.





Last edited by Colin at Nov 25 2002, 06:39 AM

[Menace]

My first contacts with money were through mowing lawns and shoveling snow - but probably the best money/work lesson I got came at 14 years old.

I got a job as busboy at a diner my dad worked at after he got laid off from his "real" job. The owner thought I looked 16 so he put me on the schedule based on that.

I did okay but was probably typical of my age, cocky, lazy and a head full of nothing but my warped idea of how things are.

My job description as I understood it was clear tables, set water out for the people and stay the hell out of everyone's way.

About 2 weeks into the job, someone told me a family made a huge mess under a table and I should clean it up.

In typical know-it-all fashion, I said it wasn't my job and went on with what I was doing.

The owner heard about it, went and spoke with my dad who told him to fire me. I got canned minutes later but got to finish out the day since dad was my ride home.

On the way home there wasn't the ferocity I expected but instead a very calm lesson in working for the pay, and not some idealistic job description.

This was a big turning point in my understanding of money, work and how the willingness to do one kind of opens up for the receiving of the other.

Nice thread Colin

[Edd]

you people got PAID to cut the lawn? I'd only get paid when I cut the neighbor's yard - an easy $10 PLUS they had a HOT daughter!

We still joke with my parents that they only reason they had kids was for the labor!

[Mike AI]

Serge, I think people who tip a lot were those who used to be in posistions where they relied upon tips. Hence if someone is born into money and did not have to wait tables, or work as a cab driver they have no concept about what tips mean to the bottom line.

On the other hand, people like you and I ( I worked as a waiter from time to time in HS and college) understand how important tips are, especially for good service.... so we tip well when the opportunity arises.

OF course tips are also effected by moods, and service. IF a waiter sucks I will tip a lot lower ( of course the shitty waiter probably thinks I an cheap, I always thought of leavng a note to say that the shitty service was the real reason why). I have also tipped tremendously when I have been celebrating or in some sort of awesome mood. ( usually coupled with good service)

[Almighty Colin]

From the journal of socio-economics:

1) Tip percentages are only weakly related to customers' ratings of service quality in restaurant settings. This finding suggests that restaurant tips are poor measures of customer satisfaction with service and that they provide weak incentives for delivering good service.

2) Nonverbal server behaviors that communicate liking for the customer, such as lightly touching the customer and crouching next to the table when interacting with the customer, substantially increase the tips restaurant servers receive. These findings suggest that managers can significantly increase their employees' compensation without adversely affecting the company's bottom line by encouraging their servers to touch customers and to display other nonverbal signs of liking for the customer.

3) Tipping is more prevalent in countries whose populations are achievement-oriented, status-seeking, extroverted, neurotic and tenderhearted. These findings suggest that tipping exists to serve several functions, i.e., to increase the social attention/esteem that servers give customers, to reduce consumers' anxieties about being served by others and to allow consumers to financially help servers.

[Almighty Colin]

Also interesting ...

"According to the NPD Group, which does research on consumer marketing, single dinners leave an average tip of 19.7 per cent. That number drops to 16.9 per cent for two people, 15.2 per cent for three, 15.9 per cent for four and 13.2 per cent for five.

Researchers have theorized that a phenomenon known as diffusion of responsibility may account for the downward slide."

This explains the tip added to the bill for large parties. I wonder what would happen if someone refused to pay it.

[Peaches]

Originally posted by Colin@Nov 25 2002, 12:08 PM
This explains the tip added to the bill for large parties. I wonder what would happen if someone refused to pay it.

Oh geeze, I have a HS girlfriend that tips about 5%. Not only that, but she always goes out of her way to order the least expensive thing on the menu. The fact that she and her husband each make 6 figure salaries and drive expensive cars just pisses us all off even more Thankfully, through the years she's losened up, but we always dreaded having to pitch in to cover her tip deficiency. We used to laugh that when we had dinners at someone's house, she was probably sticking food in her pocketbook to eat later

I waitressed for a few years and I always leave a large tip. Especially if it's very busy and the waitress is working her ass off and I suspect she gets lower tips from others because she's not able to attend to them very well. And I ALWAYS tip the waitress at the Waffle House substantially

[*KK*]

Hey what comes around goes around, I had a nice cabbie from the airport to the Aladdin in Vegas, and we talked about the fact that for Comdex week Vegas was dead and he wasn't making squat for tips. I tipped him the same as the fare, and the next thing you know the Aladdin stuck me in the endcap suite for the same price as a large room...

Originally posted by Colin@Nov 24 2002, 02:57 AM
What is your very first memory of money? Does it tell you anything about who you are or who you have become?


When I was in first grade, a girl in my class only had 6 cents and milk was 7 cents. I gave her a penny. Because of this, I thought of myself as a good person. At the end of year, my teacher gave me a grade of "Needs Improvement" for "Shares with Others". I told her the story and said that not everyone shares and needs to be seen by the teacher doing it. I told her that I thought kids that did nice things only to be seen by the teacher were probably not really that nice anyway. I then asked that she changed my grade. She did not.

Whoa! Cool story Colin. You were a Taoist in grade school! She was probably too ignorant to realize how advanced what you said was.

First thing I remember about money was making a buck trying to help a neighhbor figue out who stole something from his yard. I still have that dollar bill too! Might be the only one I ever saved! =]

[Almighty Colin]

So let's see if we became these stories ... we would predict:

Serge would sell things that had no tangible value and have always be on the lookout for people that break promises (GBU).

Vick would have a life that involved baiting.

Kid would grow up to be the guy that uses his Visa to buy $2.19 items at the store.

Cal would be interested in helping the less fortunate.

Mutt would hang out with Creepy People.

Slavik would sell photographs cheaply but sell a lot of them.

Menace would work hard.

Mark would try and catch thieves.

Honey Blond would pretend to be a boy (Anything you wanna tell us?)

Lisa would swallow.

i remember being about 7 years old and wanting to go to the Roller rink while my parents ran errands on a saturday. when i held out my hand for money, they looked at me and said "if you wanna play.. you gotta pay"

i agreed to wash the car and vacuum it and do some other errands for 5$. for me it was a lot of money. all day long i was thinking about it. when i got home, i made a long schedule of tasks and what it would cost. taking out the garbage, vacuuming the living room, washing the cars etc etc. Everything seemed trivial at .50 for this and .75 for that. but by that saturday, they owed me 15$.

i then went to my grandparents who lived nearby and and presented them with a similar offer. the next week, i made 25$.

for some reason, i always had money when i was little and my friends didnt. i learned early on that everything comes at a price and if you want it... you gotta work for it. while my friends watched cartoons, i was working. when my friends wanted to borrow money from me, i offered them the chance to do certain chores on my list for me... of course they always declined.

[Winetalk.com]

Originally posted by Colin@Nov 25 2002, 11:08 AM
Also interesting ...

"According to the NPD Group, which does research on consumer marketing, single dinners leave an average tip of 19.7 per cent. That number drops to 16.9 per cent for two people, 15.2 per cent for three, 15.9 per cent for four and 13.2 per cent for five.

Researchers have theorized that a phenomenon known as diffusion of responsibility may account for the downward slide."

This explains the tip added to the bill for large parties. I wonder what would happen if someone refused to pay it.

I think the answer is much simpler than that...
the more people in the party, the more actual tip becomes in dollars and cents, thus making %% less important,
as $50 tip which is 10% is MORE in the eyes of the giver than $10, even if it represents 30%

as for refusing to pay...I did that,
the service was lousy and I complained to the waiter and manager NOT to expect a lousy cent from me.

The round of drinks was brought to the table right away, compliments of the house and this saved them the tip.

Also...back in the day I left 3 pennies on the table as a tip,
just to make a fuckin' point.

I can't care less what waiter thinks of me....

[Winetalk.com]

Lisa would swallow.
*************************

way to go, Lisa!
;-))

[Almighty Colin]

Originally posted by Serge_Oprano@Nov 26 2002, 04:39 AM

the more people in the party, the more actual tip becomes in dollars and cents, thus making %% less important,
as $50 tip which is 10% is MORE in the eyes of the giver than $10, even if it represents 30%

Serge,

I agree with that too. I would bet both those reasons play a part.

[Vick]

Colin - those predictions wouldn't be too far off in some cases :P

Another thing about the difference in what I was paid for shining shoes
It also taught me that some people will pay double for the same product or service and be happy about it

I really think my Great Grandfather felt .25 cents was all the shoe shine was worth - and wanted me to undeerstand the value of hard work

Tipping - many who have worked a job that depended on tips tend to tip a little higher, especially for good service
the first hourly wage job I had was working in a car wash after school and on Saturday's - I was 16 and living on my own - my hourly wages would cover most of the bills and I had to depend on tips to eat

I agree with the perception of amount of $ as opposed to %
I tend to tip more when by myself