Before she got into it, Sonja Tengdin thought her kids could scoop dog poop for money. “We started talking about it at the dinner table,” she recalled, winding around Lake of the Isles en route to her kids’ school one recent morning. “I said I’d pay them ten bucks. They refused. Then I thought, I’ll pay myself. How many can I get in an hour?”
A year and a half later, Sonja is one half of Scoopy Poo, a dog waste-removal service. For twelve dollars a week, Sonja and her partner Dan Myers will come to your lawn and do the job your stubborn kids will not do. Both have left the professional world for something a little, ahem, closer to the ground.
“I would never say this to a customer, but it isn’t that bad,” Sonja confided. “Two days outside, it’s dried up. You get maybe one or two fresh ones that are disgusting.”
Business is at its best (worst) in spring, when the snowdrifts bare the fruits of winter. “We’ve taken up to two hundred pounds out of yards,” Sonja said, alluding to the vernal harvest. “We have thirteen to fifteen bags of at least ten pounds each. And these are little Southwest Minneapolis yards! The dogs are working hard,” she said. “So are we.”
Scoopy Poo customers get a bag left on their doorknob that contains a couple of tootsie rolls, a dog biscuit, and a “poo haiku.” (Scoopy’s website has dozens, including such nuggets as “I watch where I step/Determined not to mash poo/Ugh, my cross trainers.”) Company stickers are printed with the slogan, “Always on Dootie.”
Southwest Minneapolis has become the business’s profit center. Sonja said she is chagrined that her Kenwood neighbors don’t use the service. She has some ideas why, though. Kenwood residents don’t get poopy lawns because they are aggressive dog-walkers: As a rule, they are self-scooping down at Lake of the Isles or Kenwood Park.
By contrast, Southwest Minneapolis dogs are more apt to poop where they live. Are their owners just lazy? “Well, they won’t walk across Xerxes to go to Lake Harriet,” Sonja allows. Other than Southwesterners, she said they have identified another prime demographic for their business: “The gay population, because dogs are extremely important to them, they have disposable income, and they are extremely particular about the way the yard looks,” she explained, after dropping the kids off and easing her Chevy Suburban out of the parking lot.
Sonja said the company tends to pursue the more upscale customers, and it shows—she wears a nice skirt and stylish jean jacket. “We try to project a certain image,” she said, scooping a few logs. “It’s not like it’s a hick from Hodunk, pulling up in a Gremlin with a cig in his mouth.”
Dan took the lead and Sonja followed, as they baby-stepped their way to a clean lawn. The first yard was heinous, but the next few on the route were relatively benign.
After they’ve walked the last yard following a thorough grid pattern, Sonja hangs a gift bag on the client’s door and Dan sprays off his boots. They hope to grow the business to the point where they don’t have a lot of contact themselves with the raw materials.
“We are interested in eventually franchising it and setting up around the country,” said Dan. Sonja added that Columbus, Ohio, has a flourishing scoop service. Why can’t Minneapolis? “They have seven hundred scoops a week!” she said. Scoopy Poo currently picks up about fifty yards a week.
“Our goal is for Dan and I not to be scooping,” she said, throwing a partially loaded bag into the garbage. “Obviously, we have to put in the elbow work first, you know, whatever you call it, the hard work.”—Geoff Ziezulewicz
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