Follow-up to my Korner Boyz column

I need to make a clarification about the story I told the other day in my Baltimore Sun column about the Korner Boyz startup – the new venture of mentored squeegee boys into the bottled water business and eventually off the streets.

I used the word “wholesale” to describe the nature of this new business, and that’s not quite right. “Bulk sales” might be a better description of what the boys will be doing. While priced for resale, Korner Boyz water is not yet a classic, big-scale wholesaler with a low price-point. They’re just getting started. There’s a good-cause factor in their prices, which you can see below.

“The intention is for institutions to resell the water, and the prices are within a reasonable market price,” says Michael Scott of Equity Matters, one of the mentors of the squeegee boys. “We will eventually compete at scale. At this point, we are buying, packaging and reselling at a price-point that others can resell. And there’s a market precedent. We may be at the high end but only slightly so, and that represents discriminatory pricing, launch price-points and goodwill all inherent in the pricing.”

Here are the prices:

Two points need repeating for emphasis:

1. While the four squeegee boys I met the other night said they were not yet ready to put away their squeegees and spray bottles, the plan is to eventually do that and devote their time to pitching sales of KB water and sell it by the bottle at events and festivals.
2. The fact that that bottles are plastic and need to be recycled was raised by one of the boys during meetings with mentors at MICA. They are talking about how to get their plastic into the recycling stream, and their mentors have been impressed at the environmental consciousness the boys exhibited during discussions over the last several months.

Correction: In the column on Korner Boyz, I incorrectly stated that the Greater Baltimore Creative Alliance was MICA’s main partner partner in the annual Baltimore Thinkathon. It is actually the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance. The son (of the late Rose and Joe Rodricks) regrets the error.