Candi Collecting Pallets

I went to get keys made again yesterday, because I'm always running out of keys. As usual in the keymaking process, I tried to go to Home Depot first but they don't do Medeco keys, so I'm always disappointed. Eventually I got to the Ace, where the nice wacky young girl works in the back. Her name is sort of like Candi, so I'll call her that. I decided I was going to get a bunch of keys, three of each. Candi does keys but she doesn't do Medeco keys, but a guy there knows how, even without the stupid card you're supposed to have. "Meehhhdecooo," Candi sighed into the intercom, and he came in from mopping out back to do it. The mop handle had just hit him in the head and he had a red mark. They resumed a conversation from earlier about the business of recycling pallets. They got the idea because there's a guy who comes around every week in his pickup truck, and he takes their pallets to the pallet recycling place, and he's getting paid three bucks a pallet. Actually they're paying a little less now, something like under three bucks. The price just went down.

Candi looked up the nearest pallet recycling place on her work computer. It wasn't too far, and she and the other guy started working out the math.

Candi has a pickup truck (it's her dad's pickup truck) and they'd also seen other people driving around with their trucks piled up with pallets too, so they figured they could get 20 or maybe even 25 pallets in the truck. 20 times three is… $60. So Candi thought: what if she rented a U-Haul truck for the day? Those are $19.99, basically, or just under seven pallets, at least at the original pallet price. So after your first seven pallets, and maybe three or four pallets worth of gas, every pallet after that was profit.

Candi figured she could get two across and maybe six deep, for a pallet base in the truck. So that was 12. "And they're about this high," she said, slightly underestimating, I thought, with her hands. So we figured we could get them at least ten high in the truck. So that was… I used the calculator on my iPhone. 120 pallets. Times three. That is $360. "That's way more than I make in a week," she said.

Candi's mind was a little blown and, as one will, she immediately started to work out the five days a week, 52 weeks a year plan. "And it's all tax-free!" she said. "I know," I said. We downgraded a little, trying to get in just 100 pallets a day. "Once you go to all the Aces and the supermarkets and the Home Depots, that's a lot of pallets," she said. The guy pointed out that it was probably really competitive, and everyone had a pallet routine and showed up early to get the pallets, but we weren't that worried about that. $300 a day. $1500 a week. We're not quite sure how we did the math—probably we threw in holidays or something, or subtracted for gas and truck rental—but we came up with an annual number.

"That is $64,000 a year," she said. Her mouth was open. It was like she'd never heard of such a large amount of money in her life. I vividly remember her saying the number, in part because of the old game show, "The $64,000 Question," but mostly because of her awe.

My keys were done finally and, because the Medeco keys were $11 each, all told my keys cost about 14 pallets. "Then you can expand into stripping copper," I told her, "or become a big recycling business," which I added on because I realized suggesting she become a copper stripper sounded kind of mean, or maybe tacky, and I didn't intend that at all. Candi thought maybe she'd go into business with her dad, because he owned the truck after all, and they could collect pallets together. I said that was a good idea. I don't think she'll probably do it in the end, but I'm glad she's taking these kinds of opportunities seriously.