Moving to Italy: Chickens

Within a few days of my sister’s phone call, George was referred to a job interview at a chicken factory. The owner was a friend of Cousin Luigi. I went along because he had also mentioned the possibility of making our farm an industrial enterprise.

After the job interview, the owner showed us around his factory and discussed the business opportunity  He told us he had started out ten years previously by building an incubator and with a one-quarter ownership in a truck, where each person used the truck for a couple of days. He boasted that he now owned a fleet of trucks, a house in town, one in the mountains, and that he had just purchased a twenty-four-room villa near Switzerland that he was remodeling at some enormous sum. He was a good salesman.

He showed us assembly lines of hundreds of sweet little yellow chicks being shuffled into ventilated boxes to be shipped to vendors  The business opportunity he offered to us was to raise breeding chickens, collect their eggs and sell them to his chick-hatching business. The enterprise he outlined would have cost us $500,000, due in five years. Our down-payment was “only” $33,000. At a good estimate the business would have netted $80,000 a year if everything went as perfectly as they outlined—no viruses, every hen laid every day, no deaths among the birds. That was an enormous sum in 1972, but we were not so naïve as to think that everything would be perfect.  

The biggest catch was that the loan repayment per year was $92,000—twelve thousand a year more than the income. He tossed the numbers around and we listened and tried to follow along. When we got home and calculated the costs, we were sure we had missed something, but the paperwork they sent several days later confirmed that we would have to be millionaires to even think about starting this business. We didn’t have the money to support that kind of enterprise, even if George’s parents had been willing to kick in the initial costs to convert the barn into a massive chicken coop. The whole thing seemed crazy! We wondered how this deal was regarded by regular Italians. Or was this a special deal just for us “rich Americans?”

They had promised to send along the result of George’s job interview with the paperwork, but it was not included, and we never heard from them again. 

George was getting discouraged.