🍋 Lemon Stand

Every morning you decide three things: how many cups to make, how many signs to put out, and what to charge. Then the day runs for about half a minute and you watch what happens.

People will only pay so much. Everybody walking past has a price in their head, and on a hot day that price is much bigger than on a cold one. That is why the forecast is worth reading before you buy your lemons — you cannot buy more once the day has started.

⚠️ The one thing you CAN change is your price. Use the big − and + at the bottom, any time you like. Drop it to shift the last few cups before four o'clock; put it up when there is a queue out the door. On a computer the arrow keys do the same. Changing it takes a moment though — while you are painting the new number nobody can read your sign, so they stand about waiting.

⚠️ Nobody tells you what sort of mood the street is in. The forecast gives you the weather, but on any given day people might be feeling generous or feeling careful, and that is worth up to 40c either way on what they will pay. This is the thing you are looking for in the first few seconds, and the counters are how you find it. You get told what the mood actually was at the end of the day, so you can see how close you got.

Watch the four little counters. They tell you what went wrong while it is still going wrong. TOO DEAR means drop your price. WENT ACROSS means Whiskers is beating you. MISSED means you sold out, or your queue was too long.

😼 Whiskers opens across the road on day four. He picks his price in the morning and is then stuck with it all day. You are not, and that is the whole reason you can beat him. He is standing between the crowd and you, so they meet him first — but people are not all the same, and some will walk straight past a cheaper stand to get to yours. Being a bit dearer than him costs you some customers, not all of them.

Signs do two jobs: mostly they pull more people down the street, and a little bit they make your stand look better value than his — about 5c a sign, or 10c once you have painted them.

Spend some money in the shop. All five things together cost $32 and you only start with $20, so you cannot have everything — picking the right two or three early is most of the game.

⚠️ The weather is dealt from a bag, not rolled on a dice. Every season has exactly the same fourteen days in it, just shuffled: two lots of showers, two cool, four mild, four warm and two hot. So if both the wet days have already gone by day nine, the rest of the fortnight is dry — and you can plan for it.