Yeah, I had a route before I was officially old enough. I had 4 older brothers and we all were paper boys so we had the area sewn up for the News Post. As a result my brothers could carve out a route for me out of their territory. The competing paper in the area had paper boys who just delivered and got paid. We were more like sub contractors who paid for the papers and collected from the customers keeping a profit. We had to follow strict guidelines and got incentives (sports tickets, cash bonuses, etc.) from the paper though.