Tommie Rose with his earnings. Photo courtesy of Manchester Evening News
This post originally appeared in VICE UK
Remember Jamie Oliver’s School Dinners? You know, where that angry mom puts one arm precariously through some school gates and throws wads of chips to her children like bread to ducks, and Jamie Oliver goes in double-footed on Turkey Twizzlers? The message to that was generally, “Don’t give junk food to kids,” but it’s one that 15-year-old entrepreneur Tommie Rose clearly missed.
Videos by VICE
Because 15-year-old entrepreneur Tommie Rose just made £14,000 off selling sweets to his classmates, and now his teachers are insanely mad at him.
If you’re thinking of ripping off a 15-year-old kid’s business model, here’s how you do it: employ two of your tiny, pre-minimum wage mates on £5.50 a day, invest in a CostCo volume of Lucozade and Wagon Wheels, then hustle hard. In schools where junk food is banned, having a jacket loaded with Double Deckers and Haribo is a shortcut to riches, but one the schoolboard (hereby, “The Man”) frowns hard upon.
In 2011, Tommy was suspended for ten days from his previous school, and his current institute, Buile High School in Salford, have just threatened him with the same. Stop hating the player, Buile High School in Salford! Hate the game!
Thing is, Tommie isn’t a handful-of-chips-through-the-school-gate sugar-pushing criminal (despite the fact that his head teacher literally referred to his own private tuckshop as being a “black market”, which sort of conjures an image of dimly lit rooms filled with Scarface-like mounds of sherbet)—he’s hoping to plunge his earnings into his university education, seeing as demonstrating about student fees doesn’t seem to be working. He even set up a trust fund and went about earning interest on his earnings, with the aim of ultimately getting a business degree from a top university. Dude, it doesn’t really sound like you need it?
Anyway: isn’t that a noble goal? Not if you’re some chalk-dick-drawn-on-your-back knobhead headteacher, no. Buile’s James Inman said of Tommie: “We admire this pupil’s entrepreneurship but school is not the place to set up a black market of fizzy drinks, sweets and chocolates. We have extremely high standards and with our healthy eating policy we don’t allow isotonic drinks, fizzy drinks and large amounts of sweets for the good of our children.”
This certainly isn’t the first case of a precocious kid starting up their own innovative business and just getting that paper, or working their prepubescent nuts off to make it through the day. In July, VICE reported on the Syrian children becoming the breadwinners of their family, working tirelessly through the day for little pay. Pretending to be an adult seems to be all the rage these days, too, whether it’s the children of Russian oligarchs dressing up as adults or sad British adults pretending to be kids simply to score retweets.
So what do you make of Tommie’s entrepreneurial efforts? Do you think he should diversify to sell single cigarettes to schoolchildren at 50p a pop, like the innovative tuck shop that worked its hustle outside my school when I was a kid? Maybe he could just sell drugs. Or maybe he should pay some tax on that loot, the little rip-off merchant.
Follow Tom Breakwell on Twitter
