Page 343 - One Thousand Ways to Make $1000

machine. Her investment in this machine was a little under fifty dollars. This
included cost of transportation and incidental equipment. It was large enough
to make ten gallons of ice cream at one time. With the machine she received
detailed instructions on operating it and on making various kinds of cream.
She set the machine up in a tent. Then she visited a near-by town and ordered
the required amount of ice and supplies. She bought milk from a farmer and
made up the first ten gallons of ice cream.

“I thought the girls would like a rich vanilla cream best,” said Lucy, “but I
was surprised to learn most of them preferred chocolate flavor. So I made ten
gallons of the vanilla and ten gallons of the chocolate that first day. There
were two hundred and sixty girls in the camp, all between the ages of fifteen
and twenty-two. And all wanted ice cream. But twenty gallons were more
than they seemed willing to consume in one day. It took two days to sell it.”

Lucy sold her cream in cones at five cents each, getting five hundred and fifty
cones for the ten gallons of ice cream. Each girl in the camp bought an
average of two cones daily. Her profits from ice cream sales averaged
thirteen dollars and sixty cents daily and during the hundred days she spent at
the summer camp she made a profit well over a thousand dollars—a welcome
contribution toward her college expenses.

“One really hot day I had to make thirty gallons of cream. I had to work
rather hard, but I was thrilled at the money I made. That was my biggest day.
It was a visiting day in the camp, and some boys came over from a boys’
camp about twenty miles away during the afternoon. Many of the girls’
parents had come up there too, so I did quite a good business.” The cost of
making a gallon of cream, including the ice, milk, extracts, and other
ingredients, Lucy found to be sixty-four cents. Cones cost one dollar for each
three hundred.

A machine such as Lucy used may be operated by anyone, and there are
almost unlimited opportunities for making money with it. In small towns an
ice-cream machine may be made to pay for itself many times over if placed in
a store, or near a school, or on a business street.