November 2016
Intermediate to advanced
224 pages
5h 8m
English
My first paying job was with the circus. No, I wasn’t a lion tamer or a trapeze artist. My job was more mundane, but it taught me quite a bit about business . . . and about sales. Every spring during Easter break, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus came to my town in northeastern Pennsylvania. Because it was a vacation week, I signed up to work as a food vendor.
I was assigned to sell one of the most popular products, snow cones. A tray of snow cones came pre-configured with four flavors. Orange and cherry were crowd-pleasers, but grape and root beer were not popular. However, you couldn’t get a new tray of product until you’d sold everything on your old one.
I realized ...