Forum: Group using teens in door-to-door sales to evoke sympathy and reap abnormal profits

A group has been actively recruiting teenagers to sell blocks of ice cream door-to-door in Housing Board estates. The teenage son of one of my relatives is among these recruits.

They are often drawn to posts on Instagram in which teens show off the large sums of cash they have made from the ice cream sales.

Teens who are interested contact the group, and are assigned to a certain HDB precinct. They are provided with a push cart, an ice box and the ice cream. The locations change each day, perhaps to ensure that the same homes are not visited too frequently, which could lead to a complaint made to the authorities.

The teenagers who were recruited were instructed to wear only slippers and not shoes, and to avoid flashy clothing, with the aim of giving potential buyers the impression of less well-off students trying to earn some pocket money.

The group sells the teens the ice cream at $7.50 a block, and they are told to sell it door-to-door for at least $15 per block. The teens pocket the difference as profit.

I have been told that selling 10 blocks in three hours during the evening is easily achievable, which would net the teen $25 per hour of work – very good pay for a student, and way higher than the current rate for part-time jobs available to students.

The bigger concern to me is that a dangerous seed is being planted into these young minds, that one can evoke sympathy and make abnormal profits.

This group’s business activities need to be stopped; it is taking advantage of teenagers, and may be leading them down a dangerous path.

This group is clearly the biggest winner here – the larger the pool of teenage recruits, the larger its profits.

Chin A. Ong