Neville Medhora’s Bottled Water Experiment was an interesting micro-business experiment involving the selling of chilled water bottles to motorists with the employed help of a homeless person. He conducted this experiment to determine if it was possible to turn a profit selling water with only $10 in capital.
That first experiment was way back in 2005 but he recently posted an update about a reader who took the experiment to another level. The reader is quoted with the following in Neville’s Bottled Water Experiment Part 2:
I started my own water business after reading this post. I put a twist on it however as I replaced the stationary location with a backpack lined with a trash bag full of ice and bottles, and parked my car in a stationary location with the ice chest and other water to come back and refill. I am MOBILE! I made the shirt that says “Bottled Water $1″ and headed to the river on a very hot day. People could not believe that I was doing this, everyone thought the idea was so awesome, and I couldn’t take credit. But I did sell ALL my water. 200 bottles on the first day.
I did this 5 days in the first week, for 4 hours before my shifts as a manager at chick fil a. I found out that I was making more money from selling bottled water than from my real job. So I posted ads on craigslist, offering to pay college students $10 an hour to do my bidding. I got 14 responses, and hired 5 people. Now I have a guy at the river, one at the biggest local park, two on the college campus of VCU and one in the popular downtown business sector. Each person generates about $100 a day for 4 hours of work at ten dollars an hour. thats 20 hours of labor for me to pay so 200 dollars gone, but 300 dollars are mine, minus my costs of getting water from costco, which costs me roughly $100 dollars each day. and I make $200 a day for myself, and all I have to do is go buy water once a day. Thanks nev!
I don’t know if this story is legitimate or not but it certainly is interesting to think about. $200 a day as a relatively passive income is very very nice no matter how you slice it. But it is even more interesting when you consider that the guy is simply reselling bottled water!
If someone ends up running the numbers and finding a hole in the math let me know. Otherwise, I’ll just remain in awe and imagine this to be a true story.