Maggie Mo Daycare Lemonade Stands Busted
Carnegie Mellon University, humble home to a rambunctious fourteen thousand students from across the world, manages a tight ship on its campus. CMU has risen to international acclaim thanks to its remarkable near-abstinence from off-campus travel, partying, and many other plagues of state schools. This abstinence is in no small part due to our proud CMUPD. This past Monday, police successfully raided the Tech Street lemonade stands, run by the young children of the local daycare â another successful hit against the threats to our proud Scotties.
The lemonade stands, as described by the tangentially-involved Officer Jones, were taken down swiftly and strictly in the name of the law.
âWell first off, none of these children are licensed,â he elucidated in a recent interview, âand Pittsburgh takes a clear no-tolerance stance on street vendors without proper paperwork.â
Standard response protocol, as Jones explained, for a simple unlicensed vending charge would have been to simply put the perpetrator up in jail for a few days with a small standardized bail. We inquired about the duration [â...starts at a week or soâ], about the bail amount [âOh, yeah, weâve mathed it out, as close to the familyâs monthly grocery budget as we can guessâ], and if these seemingly drastic responses applied to the age range of perpetrators in question.
âOf course, we do these [raids] all the time with minors. Local teens primarily, you know how those are. Straight to the olâ slammer.
âIt sends a message, yâknow, keeps âem from trying something new⌠hell, donât give that face. For these little ones, we ensure their top safety. We spent last monthâs budget on the Little Tykes remote controlled cruiser and some plastic cuffs, like theyâre playing House. Weâre keeping them safe and comfy, even if we gotta teach them a serious lesson.â
But these stands exhibited clear signs of a danger bigger than their diminutive stature, setting Jonesâ senses tingling to something sour. For one, several caretakers were allegedly present at the scene, actively aiding the young children in their shop logistics â and resisting police activity.
âAny adult in their right mind would make sure, if these kids werenât running a licensed operation, to put their foot right down. The way I see it, those folks werenât just ânanniesâ. They were in on the operation. The way they kicked and screamed at us for tossing these kids in the car, I knew they had something big to lose.â
The officers also made note of recent hubbub around lemon-related institutions on campus â notably a recent, unnervingly similar fundraising event by the Lemon publication. From this, Jones deduced a hypothesis: they were all interlinked. Somehow, a sect of organized crime had coagulated in the dark corners of CMU, and was collecting funds through lemonade means.
âIt makes me sick,â Jones lamented in the interview. âThis is a noble institution. This isnât what Carnegie wouldâve wanted. I, and all my officers in the CMUPD, are just doing our part to make things right. No matter how young these children are, they are feeding into a dark system, and weâve got to make sure they canât perpetuate it further.â
Though the laughter of small children no longer fills the air on bright Margaret Morrison St. mornings and one can no longer enjoy a $1 plastic cup of sugary lemonade in the heat, we know in our heart of hearts that because of this, CMU â the noble institution it is â will endure for another day.