Tom Vanderbilt of TIME reports on the shift from newspaper delivery by kids to adults that has taken place over the last 20 years, a neat business story that covers social shifts, economics and the newspaper industry. The most interesting observation is on how modern parents consider delivering newspaper too dangerous a job for kids.
The larger culture around the paperboy has changed as well. Many kids have stopped delivering papers for some of the same reasons many of them have stopped walking to school — the percentage of walkers has shrunk from nearly 50% in the late 1960s to just 16% in 2001. This is in part because of fears of stranger danger but also because families have been moving from suburbs to exurbs, which are simply too spread out for kids to cover on foot or on Schwinn Sting-Rays.
Vanderbilt goes on to explain that young adults who work in high school average higher wages throughout their lives, ostensibly from developing good universal work habits, and notes several famous people who started out as paperboys.
Maybe I'm only interested because I'm in the news business but I find the whole package intriguing.
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