Do teens still go around soliciting snow removal work from homeowners anymore?

While it’s not so common a sight – where it becomes all the more frustrating is when the long arm of government steps in and stops a couple of budding entrepreneurs from making a buck from the storm.

Eighteen year old Matt Molinari and Eric Schnepf, learned the hard way of how difficult it is to make a buck in New Jersey.

Enter the Bound Brook Events Facebook page, where the story went viral – and drew support for the young budding businessmen.

"Are you kidding me? Our generation does nothing but complain about his generation being lazy and not working for their money,". "Here's a couple kids who take the time to print up flyers, walk door to door in the snow, and then shovel snow for some spending money. And someone calls the cops and they're told to stop?"

Bound Brook has laws against unlicensed solicitations, but the reason the cops cited for stopping the teens had nothing to do with their efforts to get work, but more about the weather conditions.

"We don't make the laws but we have to uphold them." This was a state of emergency. Nobody was supposed to be out on the road."

Of course he said this after reading some of the comments on the Facebook page.

Jannone said his department doesn’t want to crack down on kids looking to earn extra money shoveling sidewalks – but for scam artists.

"The spirit of the ordinance is to protect residents from gypsy activity. People will solicit door to door and target the elderly and get into their house."

Actually he’s right about that. My grandmother was scammed by gypsies once – and it’s not all that unusual an occurrence.

But targeting kids who’d leave their phone numbers on a flyer sounds like overreach on the part of the police – and a little bit of a shakedown on the part of Bound Brook.

"People doing something illegal probably won't extend this much identifying information."

And as for Schnepf and Molinari, they got 5 jobs yesterday afternoon, making anywhere between 25 to 40 bucks a house.

Now watch the IRS try and go after them.

Were the police right in cracking down on the Bound Brook teens soliciting snow removal work?

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