A Harebrained Scheme to Sell Christmas Trees on the Streets of New York

Then we drove around for a while, with all of us in the truck. I remember lying on the trees in the back with Brad, just looking up at the skyscrapers, and it started to snow. It was this incredibly magical moment—flat on our backs, driving through New York City with the snow coming down.

Brad: The smell of the pine needles from the trees back there, the scent of the schnapps … It was magical.

Something just occurred to me. I remember I had a job selling Christmas trees a couple of years before that. I was bragging about my proficiency and I was brought in as a sort of expert, to help fill in the technical aspects of really hawking the trees. I’m sorry that I didn’t deliver on that. You could tell how low my stock went, because I ended up in the back of the truck driving around in the freezing cold.

Kevin: This is how people freeze to death, on the back of Christmas-tree trucks. There really wasn’t a big market for freelancers.

Brad: This was a two-night operation, wasn’t it? The surrender may have happened on night one.

Tom: Regarding the surrender, we drove back to the apartment after this magical ride. We parked the trees right next to a police station, thinking, Okay, that gives us some insurance. But we all basically said, “Screw it, we’ve got to go to bed.” This was probably around two in the morning.

Brad: For some reason we ignored the Quebecois’ good example of sitting out and guarding the trees all night.

Tom: I felt very comfortable that, even with the 8 million people in New York at the time or whatever, nobody would steal those trees.

Beck: And did they?

Tom: I woke up the next morning at a reasonable hour, and there was one tree that had been taken.

Beck: That’s not too bad.

Tom: We regarded that as a second Christmas miracle.

Brad: That might have been a miscount due to the Rumple Minze.

Tom: Our inventory-control system wasn’t great.

Beck: How did day two go?

Tom: We were all charged up again to go sell trees. We set up shop in what looked like a nice place, and then people started coming out of this building. It seemed like: This is great; lots of people.

Donna: It was Saturday morning.

Tom: Only then we realized that lots of the people had yarmulkes on. We’d set up outside a [synagogue].

Donna: So we moved down to the corner.

Tom: And we slashed our prices to get them to sell. Our whole objective at this point was to just get to a bar and drink. The moment we undercut the price, the demand became quite steady.

Brad: There you go, classic laws of economics.

Patty: When we were down to just [one tree], I remember this one woman came up to us. She was like, “I really, really want the tree, but I’ve got to go get my money. I’ll be back.” Then a couple came in and said, “We want the tree.” At that point we’d waited, like, a half hour for the person who said she was getting her money. So we sold it to the couple, and as they were walking off, the other person came back.