Illicit Teen Snack Tycoon Got a Suspension, And, Eventually, a Scholarship

After molding himself into a lawless snack tycoon, a teenager in Turin, Italy is getting a grab bag of responses—ranging from a high school suspension to a college scholarship.

According to the Local, the 17-year-old would take orders for snacks and drinks via WhatsApp, and fill them at a local discount store. Then, he would bring them back to school and sell them at prices lower than the cafeteria’s, undercutting the school’s snack monopoly and turning a profit for himself.

He was caught last year, and suspended for ten days. When he started his racket again this year, he got a 15-day suspension, which he will spend volunteering with a charity. He also got a bunch of job offers, and a scholarship from the Einaudi Foundation.

Five hundred pupils—about one third of the student body—turned out last week to protest this latest turn of events, and the regional councillor for education called it “a mistake” that the teen be rewarded for rule-breaking.

Others took the opposite viewpoint: “Perhaps the small illegal businessman of today will become the large-scale legal businessman of tomorrow,” the school’s head teacher, Stefano Fava, told TorinoToday. After all, there’s room out there for business people of various scales and legal standing.

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