Weirdest School Black Markets | School Stories #59

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[couchpotato]

I remember when I was in 3rd grade how the school I went to cut down everyone's favorite tree (it had been there for many years), and when all there left was the wood chips, some kids would collect the leftover shavings in a bottle and started selling it for 10 bucks each. As it was everyone's favorite tree, kids would pay up and keep the last memories of their favorite part of school.

[JamesthePizzaMan]

In middle school we had an English teacher who required us to use pens in her class for all assignments. Using a pencil on an assignment was an automatic 50%. Every day when class let out, several pens would always get left behind on the desks. The teacher would normally go around to all the desks after class and put them a sort of "lost and found" box for pens at the front of the room. I took advantage of this by making sure I was always the last person to leave the room and I would grab all the pens from the desks on my way out so the teacher would have no pens to put in the lost and found box. It wasn't long before there was a serious pen shortage at my school. People were arriving to her class and realizing their pens were gone and the lost and found pen box was empty. Then, when other students were starting to get desperate, I came along selling the pens I took for 50 cents each. My locker was right outside the English teacher's classroom so every day I'd have several people line up at my locker on the way to her class and sell them pens. This school was pretty huge for a middle school (over 1500 students) and in a wealthy area so there was no shortage of poor suckers with pockets full of change. Eventually I started doing this for pencils too, taking all the pens and pencils left behind in all of my classes as well as ones I found on the floor in the halls. Just a month into the semester I was reliably making over $5 a day, which was a lot of money for a middle-schooler. The year after that, I expanded my market into lost eraser caps and handheld pencil sharpeners. By the time I graduated I had accumulated several hundred dollars.

TL;DR I intentionally created a shortage of pens and pencils at my middle school and sold them back to people for 50 cents a piece. Later expanded into selling eraser caps and pencil sharpeners. Made hundreds from doing this.

[ninjacat]

Is no 1 gonna talk about the jock legit saving people by smuggling in snacks and giving them out to kids who had health problems. WHEN DO WE HEAR ABOUT KIND HEARTED JOCKS

[warrenwilson]

In the early days of the internet (dial up): Some AOL floppy disks were not protected from write, so I would get stacks of them and reformat them. Now this was all too common for this time. What I did was going to Playboy or other porn sites and download the pictures and had a little data base hidden on my dad’s HD. I would get orders on who or what content the other guys wanted and put them on these AOL floppy disks. I generally sold them for $5 each (with the AOL label still on them).

After a year of doing that I would do prints for those that didn’t have computers or not a regular access to one. It was $1 per picture, so if there were 5 pictures on one sheet it was $5. I had a place in my Trapper-Keeper that was perfect to hide the prints. I had a couple of close calls where the teachers wanted to look in my backpack, but never found them. They did ask why I had 4 or 5 disks though. I told them that there was one for each class; they bought that.

What did I spend all that money on? Candy. Lots and lots of candy. I’m surprised that I didn’t have a mouthful of cavities.

[opieg]

Fireworks. They became illegal when I was in 5th Grade. School got out in early June and from 6th grade on, it was my summer money hustle. Got out of hand in High School when the year end bottle rocket war became a thing and someone decided to use a few 120 shot displays during lunch - rule was you had to use the big stuff at home.

[derpmanderpboi]

Sounds like some kids are role playing fallout

[sketchyskies]

Not weirdest but probably the biggest: Silly Bandz

[StrickerRei-Chn]

13:51 What OP did is making some fancy IOUs

[snowbunny]

In 1997 my 7th grade started a black market for kool aid mixed with sugar. Ever so often the kool aid black market starts up again.

[jamesbriggs]

My little brother went to the drugstore and bought Jolly Ranchers in bags and sold them by the piece at school. My mother didn't like it so she made him stop.
Kathy B.

[TheCobaltKnight]

Mud bricks Are good for building (clay too) reinforce with hay and /or pine needles

[kneelingfish]

Our middle school didn't allow toys of any kind so we would sell Legos, fidget spinners, even action figures for varying prices. I believe the action figures ran for 3 dollars, spinners ran for 2, and the Legos ran for 25 cents to a dollar fifty. The teachers knew but they said nothing. Admin never found out.

[ArshAttarProductions]

We had an obsession in elementary school over beyblades. Every recess, you would see a circle of kids yelling "Fight fight fight!" and in the center you would find two people battling with their beyblades in a plastic stadium. The school eventually banned it, but it didn't stop us. A black market developed for the toys. All beyblades, especially the good ones, became valuable as gold, and kids would use their allowances and other random things to trade.

It escalated so much that once a teacher got angry at a kid for having it out, and the kid aimed the beyblade at her teacher with her launcher, stared her dead in the eye, and shouted, "LET IT RIP" at the top of her voice. The beyblade shot straight at the teacher's face, and gave her a scar for the rest of the year. Tears and blood were shed. The student was suspended.

Many other students began arming themselves with beyblades as well to shoot the teachers, and it became a revolution. The administration soon gave up after that and unbanned beyblades. It went back to just playing it at recess, and the attacks stopped.

[paincreatesfame]

Weed, which is funny because it’s legal here. We don’t need a black market for something that’s already legal to obtain 🤷🏻‍♀️

[johnheaviside]

Well not school but jail. You could buy wellbutrin retreived from the vomit of someone punched in the gut and spit it out that way

[idontlikespam]

I was real good at making paper airplanes in the first grade and other kids would give me stuff like stickers to make one for them. Not actual money tho bc we weren’t allowed to have it in school

[toxiczombiewolf]

Mine was lollipops hard to find 5p really sour same flavour 3 colours would change you tounge colour to blue, red or green I was in on it to lol. Now you can buy bulk on amazon for £8

[SaraMarie]

I explained this one before, but damn.

During the 1990s, while in elementary school, there was a black market for comic books. Yes, many teachers thoughts kids should be reading all text, but most of us kids wanted to read what was interesting. Besides, have you ever tried to force a kid to read without pictures? You damn well know, it's nearly impossible. It was why most Children's literature is often filled with picture books.

If you have dyslexia and a teacher doesn't refuse to help or believe in that, you'll need a lot of praying to do. So, comic books were the solution. Someone would charge another for the service as photocopiers were becoming common. At first, it was black and white, but later color was offered. Of course, while a black and white comic book was about 25 cents, a color one would be about 75 cents. It was coin-operated, BTW, so it made sense. Anything about $1 for a kid from the projects was serious business.

The photocopiers in the library belonged to the librarian, so she was clearly in on it as she got extra money. Yes, we had book fairs, and most of the folks were in on it too.

For a while, it was just copies of comic strips, so comic books like DC or Marvel. Then, someone made copies of the kids' books at the library, so they don't need to worry about late fees. Should've been a red flag when she didn't bother with charging the project kids with late fees.

It was all fine until one kid found their sibling's homemade comic, thinking it was a DC or Marvel one, took it to school, made copies, sold the copies, and return the original to their siblings.

You can see where this is going.

The homemade comics were more graphic than the ones we were used to. This was about a year after the TV Parental Guidelines system was introduced. Did I mention, that people were still talking about the Death of Princess Diana months after the incident? So, it was about 1998. The homemade comic found its way to the principal's desk, but it was intercepted by the dickhead assistant principal. Look, the principal would've banned the comic anyways, and left the other comics alone. NOPE! dickhead assistant principal went apeshit, to the point one kid snitched on the entrepreneur kid who created it. D'Oh!

As you guessed, the snitch got beaten up, the entrepreneur got detention, the entrepreneur's sibling got into trouble, and many parents were astonished. Most weren't upset about the matter, as much as, they were impressed with the kids' marketing skills.

In my high school in the early 2000s, there was a black market for video game cheat codes, but it wasn't as scandalous.

[tallybone]

Ahhh man now I want to do this at my school once covid ends lol

[Lyoko]

Roms, emulators and rom hacks.

In my high school for some reason there was a demand for them. The internet in the area wasn’t great at the time so downloading them at home wasn’t great but I had a thumb drive that had a GBA emulator and a few roms on it that I got from my cool uncle. Anyway after copying the emulator and roms on to a few laptops in exchange for snacks a normally shy student who was bused from an area with better internet offered to help increase the revenue.

It broke down like this:

At home the kid with good internet would download the emulators and roms onto a few thumb drives. We would then distribute them in exchange for pop and and chips.

This was right after the school got rid of all the pop and junk food vending machines and replaced them with heathy food (which lead to a buck food black market as well) so you’d have to bring them yourself if you wanted an emulator/roms.

Each game cost a small bag of chips and an emulator cost a bag of chips and a pop.

It ended up getting crazy when one of the students from the computer coding class decided to get involved as well. He used what he was leaning in coding to create rom hacks and GS codes.

This was before GS codes and Rom Hacks were well known so they sold well.

GS codes cost you a bag of skittles per code and a rom hack cost the same as an emulator.

As you can imagine the two black markets fed each other for about a year and a half before the school started cracking down on them. They didn’t really crack down on the emulator market but as they cracked down on the junk food market and better internet became available in the area during my last semester before graduation the demand for emulators and roms slowly died down. The student who made rom hacks just ended up giving them to anyone who asked.

It was fun while it lasted.