Updates from the Road - December 22, 2017: Entrepeneurship and Dealmaking Arrive in Shreveport

I’ve always dreamed of visiting Shreveport, but since I’m not a GTurd fan, I can’t use the Independence Bowl as an excuse to go there. But today, that dream materialized into reality.

Getting from Meridian, Mississippi to Shreveport isn’t the easiest thing to do without a car. Thankfully we ran into a fellow Dawg fan who distributes bread to Subways in Mississippi and Northern Louisiana. He agreed to give us a lift down to Shreveport in the back of his truck in exchange for five pairs of counterfeit Oakleys, which we happily gave up for the ride. He also gave us a booklet of buy one get one free coupons, so we are going to be eating like kings for the rest of the journey.

It isn’t often a place fully lives up to expectations, but Shreveport proved to be everything I’d hoped. Chemical plants, chain restaurants, the Independence Bowl, a bridge – this city has pretty much anything you could want. We were able to find a really great Sears there and stood out front and sold several pairs of counterfeit Oakleys to holiday shoppers before security intervened and forcibly removed us from the premises. It’s really a shame that Sears, once an icon of American ingenuity, no longer respects the entrepreneurial spirit. I guess we now know why that company is in trouble.

The day ended with an interesting proposition. We ended up befriending the desk clerk at the Days Inn where we are staying by offering him some Fireball. He was kind enough to look the other way when we went door to door at the hotel selling counterfeit Oakleys and telling them they could just put it on their bill. He was so impressed with the operation that he wanted to get in on the counterfeit Oakley distribution business, and negotiations began. After hearing about some of our transportation issues, he offered to trade us his ’97 Dodge Stratus straight up for one of our garbage bags of the sunglasses. We agreed to sleep on it, and the parameters for a historic compromise began to take shape.