My 18-year-old son is retired.

He just gave up his paper route, after six long years. It was a weekly neighborhood paper, covering community council meetings and the local high school sports teams, mainly. The job wasn’t a very lucrative gig, when you consider the time spent bagging the papers, delivering, and then collecting payments once a month. But it provided him with some folding money once his Tooth Fairy days were over.

Nice panel van, Mister!

Other than our summer vacations, he delivered every Wednesday for six years. If “80% of success is just showing up” then his route was great career training.

As you might guess, his subscriber base (average age: 72) was dwindling. Sometimes quite literally dying off. In the internet era, no one reads the paper anymore. Heck, half the population doesn’t even know what a newspaper is.

They don’t even get the gossip rags anymore.

Don’t worry that our son will get lazy. He’s still working. In fact, he’s still in the delivery business. But instead of papers, which very few people care for anymore, he’s delivering something everyone likes to consume: