For more than a hundred years, Princeton Student Agencies have offered goods and services — some essential, some luxurious, others just plain wacky — to the Princeton community. In 1946, an all-male group of juniors founded the Tiger Tot Tending Agency, offering babysitting services to faculty and town folks to widespread demand. “The Tiger Tot Tenders got an unexpected bonus of being picked up by the national press and then we were off,” wrote Charles Biddle ’47, a PAW reader and one of the agency’s co-founders. The news traveled as far as Washington state, where in January 1947, the Spokesman Review even ran a front-page photo of Peter Walmsley ’47, co-founder and manager, reading to two tots. “As I remember, it was hard work and not overly lucrative at 35 cents an hour,” Biddle wrote, adding, “Nevertheless, it was good training. If you could survive that madhouse, later life stresses would appear minor in comparison.”
Entrepreneurship in the student agencies continues at Princeton. Earlier this month, the Special Occasions Student Agency piloted a new program: an on-campus grocery delivery service. For a fee of $7.50, the agency will deliver groceries from Wegman’s to campus. For an additional $5, the agency will bring those groceries straight to a student’s dorm room.