Make Money with Your Car

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PHOTO: MOTHER EARTH NEWS STAFF
If you have a vehicle and live out in the country, you can make part time money with your car or van.

Country people get along just fine without city sewers or half-hour pizza delivery. Still, there are plenty of goods and services that must be provided to families, farms, and small businesses scattered across wide rural distances. One way to earn cash in the country is to service the spread-out rural “infrastructure”–driving motor routes delivering newspapers, students, and mail.

One commodity that requires timely delivery is the news. Maybe Dan Rather can supply big-picture news electronically, but nothing can replace the small-town daily or weekly newspaper. Advertising is the key. The farther from town a newspaper can peddle its wares, the larger its distribution map, and the more potential country-customers the salespeople have to entice. A paper will go to considerable lengths to maintain its rural distribution network–the keystone of which is the rural motor-route driver. If you have the (often peculiar) hours free, have a reliable vehicle, can perform routine maintenance and minor repairs on it, and are willing to drive country roads stuffing papers in delivery tubes, you can bring in a steady cash income.

Best paying are big-city daily papers, which are delivered farther afield than you might think. Less affluent and tighter with pay are the small-town dailies. Most dailies publish on all five weekdays and Saturday. Although many small-town papers deliver their weekday papers in the afternoon, television news programs are getting the jump on afternoon news. As a result, small-town papers are gradually moving toward morning delivery, to accompany morning coffee. Be prepared to work between midnight and the wee hours of the A.M.

Evaluate The Market

  • Published on Apr 1, 1993
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