The Eraser King

I picked my son up from school the other day and asked him how things were going. "Good", he said. I asked him to expand on that general thought. He went into a long explanation about how he was selling things in class for tokens and told me about the things he had been selling. Selling? It seems that his teacher has let a secondary market for school supplies develop in her class. Kids in her class earn tokens by being good or getting work in on time. They can use those tokens to buy pencils or erasers or some small toys or a day without shoes. Really, a day without shoes is a thing you can buy. Anyway, my son decided that since he had some extra pencils and some small toys that he had bought earlier that he could make a tidy profit by selling them. He asked his teacher if this was ok, he even wrote up a contract outlining his honest business practices, and she approved. Due to some supply issues in the teachers supply box he was doing pretty well. Well enough, in fact, that other kids took notice and decided to copy him. One girl in particular noticed that since the teacher was out of erasers, my son was able to sell them for 10 tokens each. She had a handful of erasers herself, and decided to undercut him at two tokens. Now, if it was me, I would have taken this as a sign that my price was too high and lowered it to be competitive. Not him. He walked over to her desk with a handful of tokens and bought every last eraser she had. He then walked back to his desk and declared that the price for erasers in the class was back up to 10 tokens. My elementary age son managed to corner the secondary market on erasers and pull in a tidy profit. I'm not entirely sure this is the kind of thing you can teach. I'm both extremely proud and slightly fearful. He is truly the Eraser King.