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From Zero to Side Hustle
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It’s five o’ clock somewhere.
🍽️ Ina Garten spent fifteen years running a specialty food store in East Hampton before she wrote a cookbook. She has said the store taught her something important: people do not want to be taught. They want to be handed something that works.
The television career came second. The retail counter came first, and that is where the method got built.
We like people who did the unglamorous version long enough to learn something the fast route never teaches. The counter, the route, the loading dock. That’s where the useful knowledge lives, and it’s why we keep going back to look for it.
Last plate of the week.
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Somebody Gets Paid $150 To Bring Twelve Carts Home
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Shopping carts leave. Bus stops, creek beds, apartment blocks, and every one is an asset the store has to replace.
What it will not do is send an employee out in a truck to get them.
That's the gap: the store owns the carts, cannot afford to lose them, and will not go get them.
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
A route, priced per trip rather than per cart. Shota Mkheidze runs Honeybee Dynamics in Honolulu for Walmart, Target and Whole Foods at $150 a trip, about twelve carts a load. One client loses roughly 100 carts a year per location.
Fixed price per trip means every hour you cut is yours.
►Mkheidze started with a restaurant cleaning company and added carts around 2021, and the move that made it a business was not sales. He re-sequenced his Kapolei loop and cut it from about five hours to two and a half, so half the day came back as margin without one new customer. Roughly 80 percent of people holding carts hand them over. The rest need a police officer.
Zooming out: the retrieval gets you the contract, the fleet gets you the money.
West Coast Shopping Cart Service has been at it forty years and sells those accounts wheel replacement, welding and cleaning. Retrieval is the wedge; the fleet is the business.
🥢The winners will be the ones who price the trip and shrink the route, because the customer buys an outcome, not hours. Route density is the entire margin.
🍜 The risk is that your customer is buying the thing that kills you. Gatekeeper sells wheel-lock containment on a promise to cut retrieval and replacement spend by 90 percent, and every account that installs it stops needing you. The trade is consolidated too, one firm holding roughly 70 percent of Southern California.
Then sell the maintenance. The goal isn’t to collect carts. It’s to be the outsourced fleet department for an asset nobody wants to own.
You might also like ⇢ Retrieval Companies Round Up and Return Wayward Wagons
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What's your take?
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How One Artist Approaches Wholesale Retailers
Who used it: Chanamon Ratanalert, a San Francisco illustrator selling stickers, washi tape and prints into boutiques. Interest back from roughly every 20 sent.
The recipe:
Hi! My name is Chanamon and I'm an illustrator based in San Francisco…
You would be joining national chain Attic Salt and dozens of other boutique shops in successfully spreading color and cheer with our products…
You can view our wholesale catalog here: [link]
📋 Why it works: three moves in one paragraph. It puts the retailer's own customers before her story, it names an existing chain account so the buyer is not the first to say yes, and it drops the catalog link inside the first email so nobody has to write back to ask for one. Most wholesale pitches cost the buyer a reply before they show a product.
Swap this for your niche: the named account you use as proof that somebody already took the risk.
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The Assembly Line Worker Who Kept The Dog
Mike Bowling spent almost twenty years on the Ford line in Cincinnati. Over the 1983 holidays he sewed a droopy stuffed dog with sad eyes, and then did the thing almost nobody does: rather than trying to manufacture it, he licensed the design out and kept ownership of it.
Irwin Toy took Canada. Tonka took the United States. Hanna-Barbera made the cartoon.
In 1985 alone Pound Puppies sold more than 2.5 million units at $30 each, over $300 million gross, on a design that was still his. Roughly 200 million had sold by 2016. He finally sold the intellectual property to Hasbro in 2011.
Still cooking: the trademark lives at Hasbro. Bowling left Ford and never stopped inventing toys.
He never built a factory. He built one dog and then said no to owning anything else.
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The Podcast Grew A Camera
Audio podcasting spent fifteen years insisting it was not television. Then the payouts moved.
Spotify expanded its Partner Program on January 7, 2026, dropping eligibility to 1,000 engaged listeners, 2,000 consumption hours in thirty days and three published episodes, after monthly video podcast consumption nearly doubled since the programme launched. That is the big money legitimising the format.
The solo opening is not hosting a show, it is filming other people's. Truth Work Media in South Bend, Indiana publishes rates outright: $1,500 a month for up to three audio episodes, video packages from $3,000 a month, and a $3,500 six-week launch package. No discovery call, no proposal.
Where the trend branches next:
Professional-services shows, where the client is a firm and the budget is marketing
Converting an existing audio back catalogue to video for YouTube and Spotify
Renting multicam studio hours to other people's shows between bookings
Recruiting-focused shows for trades that cannot hire fast enough
Everyone wants a show. Almost nobody wants to own three cameras and learn to light a table.
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Hungry yet?
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Enough talk. Go cook.
That's the plate, and that's the week. Reply and tell us which of these four you'd actually start. Forward this to somebody who needs a business that arrives See you Monday.
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