Well, that turned out even worse than I feared. We lost money on the fireworks stand.
I realize I have a near-magical ability to cause money to flee from my presence, but this is ridiculous. We were told we would "make so much money" from running a stand, by someone who has been running one for 30 years. All the qualifiers cropped up after we were committed.
I had been afraid we would end up not making much, but now that my dad (who was actually running the stand) has gotten the check from the fireworks company, we discover that they didn't pay us 15% of what we sold, but 15% of their profits on what we sold-- a big difference. One which we have no way of verifying and which wasn't made clear in the paperwork, if it was mentioned at all.
I've already written about the troubles we had. But I was still believing we would end up with a little money out of the two week's work. Nope. It cost us more to run the stand than we got in the end, which was $298 split two ways after some of the operating expenses were subtracted. And those operating expenses didn't include things like the gasoline for running back and forth between home and the stand. Plus they required us to buy other supplies-- some of which we didn't actually need. Almost every issue we had we were told "that's YOUR responsibility".
Well, screw them.
Needless to say, I am not very impressed with Mr. W Fireworks right now. Not impressed at all.
Their lack of support was appalling. Their lack of communication was almost as bad. I don't feel they were honest dealers. If you ever decide to run a fireworks stand, avoid that company. And if I buy fireworks in the future, it won't be from one of their stands.
Update to the update--
We looked over the records we kept and discovered they were claiming we turned in a lot less money than we did. So we contacted them and provided all the evidence they demanded. They finally "discovered" that they hadn't counted our largest deposit, so they sent another check. But, suddenly they decided we had turned in a lot less unsold inventory than we should have, so they deducted that amount from the new check- which ended up being most of what we should have gotten in that check. So we came closer to breaking even, but not a lot. Mr. W Fireworks is NOT an honest company-- either that or they are completely incompetent (or both). Avoid them!
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