Bought and Sold

When I entered the cave of the Troll-Woman, I had two decisions to make: how much product to buy, and how much to take with me at one time. These seemed like tricky things to gauge. But in the end it didn’t make a damn bit of difference.

The Troll Woman “sold” me the product on credit, which was lucky for me since I didn’t even have enough money of my own to withdraw a whole twenty-dollar bill to use for bank. She also gave me a receipt for what I “bought.” This receipt was broken up into units, like coupons or vouchers, one for each package of the product that I had bought. I could cash these coupons in at the commissary throughout the night and get more product any time I wanted to. I could just hand my coupon to the Igor who attended to the Troll Woman, and he would fetch the ice cream or malts or cotton candy or whatever from the freezer or appropriate box. And if I ever ran out of vouchers and still wanted to sell, I could “buy” more from the Troll lady any time.

At the end of the night, I needed to be able to return to the Troll Woman the total amount that I owed to her, but this could be done through a combination of currencies: money, unsold product, or the coupons I hadn’t turned over to her Igor. Hopefully, I was able to do this mostly with money, because I got a cut of anything I sold. But if not, there was no penalty. As long as it all added up, I was fine. So it really didn’t matter how much I bought at the beginning.

What’s much more of a quandary is deciding how much to carry at one time. Ice cream comes in packages of six, so you might want to take three of them at a time. But that gets heavy. Especially with the dry ice added in. So be careful. Malts come eight in a pack, and so do frozen lemonades. Three of those might be too many. Other products, even the lighter ones, have similar considerations. For example, if you take too many Dodger Dogs at one time, the ones on the bottom will be smashed flat and people will not want to pay full price for them. However, you also don’t want to waste too much time going back and forth to the commissary to get more. Also, the commissary is just plain unpleasant, even when dealing only with the Igor, and should be avoided as much as possible.

What I learned pretty quick was that you don’t have to be too worried about frozen stuff melting, especially with the dry ice in the thermal bag. What you do have to worry about is burning the tips of your fingers off while you put the dry ice in your bag.

The dry ice is in an unmarked, unlocked cooler that just sits in the hallway on the field level concourse. There aren’t any tongs or gloves or anything. Like most lessons learned at Dodger Stadium, getting the dry ice into my thermal bag to keep the ice cream frozen was one that I had to teach myself. Each brick of dry ice is in its own plastic bag. If you’re lucky, there will be an open bag with a previously smashed up brick in it, and you can just dump the bag onto the ice cream. If not, you must smash up the brick inside the bag first, then open it, then dump a portion of the bag onto your ice cream. Never just start picking up bricks of dry ice and putting it in your thermal bag. This could result in a burning sensation and a patch of dead skin on your thumb. This I learned my first night.

In addition to learning the innings and outs of the stadium itself, I generally learned a new lesson about selling stuff every time I worked at Dodger Stadium.

My first lesson: Never, ever sell ice cream in the Pavilion.