Red hots! Get Your Red Hots!

When I was in high school, I sold drinks and hot dogs for the University of Utah home football games to earn a little extra money*. I walked around the stadium with a big tray of sodas or an insulated box of hot dogs. I'd call out "Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite" or "Red hots! Get your red hots!". Ten years later, I find out that Red Hots are a real product, and they are awesome. Red Hots are stubby, thick hot dogs, colored red, with a bit of spiciness. I sat down to have a couple for lunch today with 'kraut and brown mustard and reminisced about cold Utah Saturday mornings at (then) Rice Stadium walking up and down the aisles and circling the stadium. If only the hot dogs I sold as "red hots" 16 years ago had been real Red Hots, I would have been able to sell twice as many.

* I say a little, but as a vendor, you started out selling drinks. A hard working vendor could make between $50 and $100 in about 2.5 hours (they stopped refilling trays at the end of the 3rd quarter) and you could watch the end of the game anywhere you wanted to. If you had been there long enough and worked hard enough, you get promoted to hot dogs. A hot dog vendor could make $150 to $200 in the same time frame. As a high schooler in the early 90s, that beat working at Hires.