Jaequan Faulkner, age 13, did not mean to make the news. He just wanted to make some money on the side like lots of kids his age. He was selling old fashioned hot dogs for $2 and $1 chips and sodas from his front yard. How did this blow up?
Someone sent a complaint to the Minneapolis Health Department because Faulkner’s side hustle was operating as an unlicensed vendor. Faulkner became the latest case of a stream of kids trying to make side money just to be shut down by suspicious/angry adults. Talk about someone being a Karen… expecting a kid to have a vendor’s license.
Anyways, the officials didn’t immediately swoop down on Faulkner’s endeavor and shut it down. Instead, they tried to figure out how they could help the kid. When checking the business out, they were impressed by Faulkner’s drive and decided to teach him how to get his business up to code. In fact, once Faulkner’s stand passed inspection, the inspectors paid for the $87 fee!
Faulkner’s uncle helps him run the business, which serves customers from 11AM to 3PM. Faulkner is very on top of running his business, and estimates sales of 100-150 dogs sold a day. He plans on starting his own restaurant once he gets out of school.
As Jaequan Faulkner said himself, “My auntie always told me, ‘Can’t nobody stop you but you.’ If you say ‘I can’t do that,’ well, then you just set yourself up for failure.”
Jaequan seems to be a highly motivated young man. It is an awesome feat to be able to start a restaurant at home, bring it up to code, and then proceed to sell over 100 hotdogs in a four-hour window of time on a daily basis. I love the simplicity of his operation and how willing others in his community were to help him create and scale his business. It will be exciting to learn if he eventually starts a physical restaurant upon graduating from school.