He Makes $1,000,000 in 30 Days Selling Christmas Trees

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
So, this Christmas tree thing is kind of crazy. The story is this article that I read in Curbed. Basically, it's talking about the brutal mafia style business of Christmas tree sales in New York.
And I'm just going to read you a paragraph here that just captures it. It goes, Christmas trees are a big business in New York. A lot of people see the quaint little shacks that appear on the side of the road just before Thanksgiving with a bunch of trees. And you think, oh, these are probably independently owned maybe by jolly families of lumberjacks looking to make a few holiday bucks. That's what I thought anyways. In reality, a few eccentric, obsessed and sometimes ruthless tycoons control the sale of almost every tree in the city. They call themselves tree men. They spend 11 months a year preparing for Christmas time, which to them is a 30-day sprint to grab as much cash as they can.

**Shaan Puri** (0:59)
I'm in.

**Sam Parr** (1:00)
You're in, right?

**Shaan Puri** (1:01)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

**Sam Parr** (1:01)
Dude, this needs to be a Netflix show, right?

**Shaan Puri** (1:04)
Yeah, and is this the one about this guy named Scott? Well, there's a bunch of guys.

**Sam Parr** (1:08)
So he talks about the different guys because they basically carved up the territories. You got Harlem. This one guy gets Manhattan. This other guy's got the East Side. And they all have different territories. And they all have crazy names. So it's like George Nash and Kevin Hammer. And it's like, oh yeah, Nash got Harlem. He's a smooth-talking hippie from Vermont. Hammer is a Brooklyn-born Scientologist. He was a powerful force in the business. He's the one who shaped it. Hammer's rumored to own half the tree stands in Manhattan, bringing in more than a million dollars every December. The lore is Hammer lives on a yacht somewhere in the Atlantic, and he visits New York only at Christmas time, where he holds up in a midtown hotel room with a pile of cash on the bed and a pit bull squatting on either side of him. Like, is this even real? What am I reading? It sounds fake.

**Shaan Puri** (1:54)
Dude, if you sell a million dollars of trees in one month, with all your expenses, that's like a $150,000, $200,000 a year salary job with way more aura. You might have a pit bull, but there ain't going to be piles of cash or a yacht.

**Sam Parr** (2:09)
But you definitely have to be like 50%. I can see there's a world where this is like 50% margin all in.

**Shaan Puri** (2:14)
Well, you ain't owning yachts in Manhattan if it's on $500,000 a year.

**Sam Parr** (2:17)
We've been doing it for like 20 years. This is an old article.
So I think, yeah, it's pretty crazy. So this it talks about like basically one interesting thing is it talks about the history of the Christmas tree. So it says 200 years ago, the idea of putting a tree inside your apartment would be a bizarre decision. It didn't make any sense. This is supposed to be shelter from the outside. Why would you bring a tree in? And it talks about how like Christmas trees that are trees themselves weren't even really associated with Christmas time. And then it says that started as change in 1851 There was a Dutchman named Mark Carr who was like, I think I can do this.

**Shaan Puri** (2:52)
What's doing this?

**Sam Parr** (2:53)
Like selling trees to people for the spirit of Christmas. And so he goes, he's considered the father of Manhattan Christmas tree business. And we don't know much about him. But basically, the way it describes him is he was out of work. And he realized that he could chop up a tree from the forest, bring it into the city and try to sell it to the people in the city to have like a piece of like nature with them. And he goes and he tells his wife, she's like, that idea sucks. This is the great story of every entrepreneur. Tell your wife an idea, she says it sucks and you do it anyways. I think that's the real American dream. And so he comes in and he basically tries to associate these trees with Christmas spirit with the jolly winter time. And he goes and he bought a got a permit for $1 to sell it inside Washington Market, which was like their wholesale bazaar. And he starts to explain to people there that these are trees that you can stand upright in your house and it signifies Christmas. And he sold about a day and that kind of started the trend of indoor Christmas trees. Again, assuming this article is not fake completely and the onion.