Opportunities II


I was watching TV tonight and they has a special on a town in the countryside where most of the residents are 65 years plus. The town was dying and there was no income coming in until one of the residents came up with an idea. The idea? Selling leaves.

You read that correctly. The town sells leaves. High end restaurants in Japan use leaves to display with the food. The towns people (many in their 80s) walk out the door and pick the leaves off the trees to sell. So how much can the earn doing this? The average monthly salary is $2,000 while in peak season they can ear as much as $20,000 a month.

It was rather funny. They took a trip to Kyoto to see all the leaves changing and all the members were estimating what each tree was worth instead of the beauty. Then then went to a restaurant that used the leaves they picked to see how they were used in food displays.

This isn’t one or two families, but the entire town. The entire business brings in over $10 million a year. Again, there are opportunities where you least expect them if you’re willing to think a little outside the box.


Information and Links

Join the fray by commenting, tracking what others have to say, or linking to it from your blog.

Information
January 4th, 2006
6 Responses
Feeds and Links
Comment Feed
From This Author
Del.icio.us
Digg
Technorati
Categories and Tags
Making Money
Miscellaneous

Other Posts



Write a Comment

Take a moment to comment and tell us what you think. Some basic HTML is allowed for formatting.

*

Reader Comments

Comment Number:
1
Written by:
~Dawn
Posted on:
January 4, 2006 at 6:55 am

Woot! That is an opportunity ‘falling into’ their laps!

Comment Number:
2
Written by:
RS
Posted on:
January 4, 2006 at 8:11 am

That is pretty amazing. How do they think of this stuff?

Comment Number:
3
Written by:
Nick
Posted on:
January 4, 2006 at 10:36 am

And here we all are throwing thousands of dollars in the dumpster every autumn! The next time the trash man comes around for my bags of leaves in the fall, I’m going to stick my hand out and say, “That’ll be 16 thousand dollars please!”

Comment Number:
4
Written by:
davis
Posted on:
January 4, 2006 at 1:37 pm

Who says money doesn’t grow on trees!

Comment Number:
5
Written by:
Cap
Posted on:
January 4, 2006 at 2:14 pm

I was waiting for someone to say that tree line.

pretty neat though. wouldn’t work in the states, not enough japanese restaurants around.. and the ones around me are all run by koreans or chinese anyway.

must be some pretty nice leaves though.