Our young entrepreneur - or maybe not so much

Several months ago we started giving Owen a small allowance. Part of the motivation was to teach him about saving and part of the motivation was to try to curb the constant requests for us to buy him just about everything he sees. It has helped with the requests because he has realized that our answer to his pleas is now just about always, "sure, you can buy it if you have enough money." The lesson on saving seems to be a hard one though. Even the smallest amount of money seems to burn a whole in his pocket. Whenever he has a bit of money, he wants to go to the store to buy some lego or playmobil set. I try to tell him it will be too expensive but he wants to go anyway, just to see. Then we get there and in fact he doesn't have enough money so he looks around to see what he can buy. I suggest that maybe he should not buy anything and continue saving until he has enough for the lego set he really wants. Finally he decided he would try to save. The lego set he wanted was 12.99. The money was slow to accumulate and he said he need some way to get more money. I suggested a lemonade stand would be just the thing. So after talking about it for a couple of weeks, we picked a hot friday afternoon and set up the stand. We (I) even made chocolate chip cookies to sell along with the lemonade. Owen was very excited and as soon as it was set up, several of his friends were lined up as his first customers. I went back in the house for something and came back out to see that he was happily giving his friends refills. And when I asked one of his friends if he had given Owen his money, he said no. Owen then said "that's okay, Phoenix doesn't have to pay because he doesn't have any money." Not so business savvy. But I have heard that restaurants where you pay as little or as much as you can afford, like the SAME Cafe or the Karma Kitchen, are the new thing in some places, so maybe he is just on the cutting edge. At any rate, with a little tighter supervision, Owen did manage to make about $12 at his lemonade stand, enough to finally buy that Lego Star Wars set he wanted. And much to my surprise, when we went to the store the next day to buy it and it looked like they were all out, he didn't even whine. And while I went to find someone to see if maybe they had another in back somewhere, he found one tucked away behind some other legos on the shelf. I was so relieved because when I told him a few weeks ago that he would have to keep saving his first question was "what if they are all gone when I come back" and I of course told him that I was sure they would still have some left. And Owen was happy. Happier than if we had just bought it for him? I'm not sure about that -but he did seem pretty proud of himself.