"S" Is For Stands of Lemonade

Me and my two younger sisters, Julie and Andi had a lemonade stand one summer.  We didn't live on a busy road but we were ambitious sales reps.  We stood at sign at the end of the road to "draw in traffic."  We had chalkboard art that advertised our price.  The usual 25 cents.  We had neighbor girls come make up cheers about lemonade and dances to perform for our customers. 
We even had a sales incentive.
You see, we took our stack of cups and randomly drew stars in blue (mostly worn out) Sharpie on the bottom.  We then mixed those cups back into the stack.  And if you were the lucky customer that stopped and got a star on the bottom of your cup.... your lemonade was on the house.  Oh yeah.  Try not to think about the fact that three little girls touched every single cup in the stack and held them and drew pictures on them... all before we served them to people.
I vividly remember a white truck full of construction workers stopping for lemonade.  What a sale!  We're talking $1.25 in one stop.  My sisters and I frantically rushed around our fold out TV dinner table.  "You get the cups!"  "You get the ice!"  "I'll take the money!"  "You always take the money!"  "Don't be mean they can hear us!"  "Just do it!" "I'll pour the lemonade."  "I get to hand it to them."  And in between all the mayhem Andi says, "There's a star on your cup!"  The truckload of dirty men didn't know what that star meant and didn't know they were about to save themselves a whoooooole quarter.  
"Wow!  You get your lemonade for free!"
To which the lead guy... most likely the foreman said:  "Oh that's okay.  You take the money."
"No.  No.  You got the star.  You're the winner.  We can't charge you for it."
"Well, take the quarter anyway."
"Nope!  We put the stars on and the people who get them get free lemonade.  Draws in more customers. We can't take your money."
"Take it as a donation, then."
"Oh, no.  No.  No.  Just consider this your lucky day!"
"It should be your lucky day.  I'll give you the quarter for keeps.  We can just forget about the star."
There was quite a bit of back and forth of the quarter.
Eventually, we won the guy over and he got to keep his quarter. 
They drove away and we settled back in to wait for the next car.

We made $17 dollars that day.
Which is pretty good for a couple of girls who didn't understand adults stop at lemonade stands to donate money to kids... not for the actual ice cold, refreshing lemonade.

We were so proud of our earnings we crunched some numbers and figured if we sold lemonade every day for a week and made $17 a day.... that would be $85 come Friday.  Split three ways was just over $28.
We went to DiStefano's and stocked up on Country Time, Dixie cups, and bags of ice.  Using most of our $17.  We didn't calculate the expense of running a lemonade stand each day into our business plan... and, luckily, were young and didn't realize that.

The next day we made $2.00 and our days of young entrepreneurship ended.

Julie, Andi, Patty