I was around 9 when I started doing recycling for money and starting mowing people's lawn and help them move from ages 11-12. After that, every Summer, I was in the field working with the migrants from ages 12-15...
Don't wish that kind of hardship on other small young children but it was a good life lesson for me...
An 11-year-old is cleaning his neighbors’ trash cans for $10 each—he now has 100K followers as teens face the worst summer job market since 1948
Teens are up against the worst summer job market in nearly 80 years, fighting just to get a shift at an ice cream shop. One 11-year-old is taking matters into his own hands and offering to clean his neighbors’ trash cans for $10. Once his school let out for the summer break in May, Ashton Meyer began knocking on the doors of local residents of East Gwillimbury, Ontario, to ask whether he could clear out their trash—and documenting each knock on Instagram and TikTok.
“My name is Ashton, and I’m doing a service to clean out all of your bins—that includes your garbage, your green bin, and your recycling,” he says on camera, door after door. Now he has 40 clients; he’s become a social media sensation, racking up more than 111,000 followers on Instagram in just two months. And as the leaves turn brown, he hopes to expand to leaf raking.
“I want to be an entrepreneur who owns his own business,” Ashton tells Fortune.
And he tells kids looking to copy him they need to lower their prices and get comfortable with rejection. After all, as you can see in his videos, Ashton gets turned down far more than he gets hired. But he hands over his number anyway, smiling: “Take it, and if you need me you can call me,” he tells one skeptical neighbor. “I’ll be here all summer.”
