I guess I shouldn’t have been shocked when Kylie came home from Kindergarten with her first fundraiser. Never the less I did groan, out loud…you see I HATE fundraisers. There are two reasons for this (1)It’s genetic. It was passed down to me from my mother who also puts fund raising on the same level as a root canal when it comes to effort and discomfort.
(2) When I was 11 years old I had to collect money for a paper route and seeing how it was so hard to get people to pay for something they already had received I decided I never wanted to SELL anything ever again!
So what is it my daughter is supposed to sell to support “field trips?” Happenings Books. These are $20 books that have coupons for restaurants, travel, attractions, and shopping. And while I don’t hate these books ( I think they can be quite useful for some people) I do hate the idea of my daughter “working on commission” at such a young age!
Fundraisers are not a new concept. When I was in elementary school (a long time ago) we would start the year with a fund raising assembly. That’s right, let’s take the students out of class for about an hour so they can listen to a sales pitch by people who were so good at their job that by the end of the last bell we were all sprinting home to sell five gazillon of whatever to get those awesome prizes (and this was when no one warned you not to sell “door to door”. I remember I was quite taken with this prize:
Well some 20 years later the prizes are still “crap” (pardon my French). In my daughters packet was a purple note with a superman-like character with big bold letters asking” Are you a SUPER starter? You see if my daughter sells 2 Books in the first 3 days of the sale she gets…wait for it…wait for it…a “FREE BIG 2 INCH SUPER BALL!”
Seriously, we should hustle our bustle so we can get a prize that I could buy at the dollar store?
But wait the prizes get much better!
If Kylie sells 1book she gets a giant inflatable balloon.
Sounds cool but it would deflate in two days and until then where would I put a 7’6” long balloon?
So we better sell 2-4 so we can get a Roomarang!
That’s right, like a boomerang but shaped like a X! Can you imagine the dents in our walls this would create and the tears when she realizes it is merely a plastic “X” that you throw! By the way my daughter would be selling $40-$80 worth of product to get a prize that I can buy online for $2.99.
For the really ambitious kids there is the shake wobble pen,
the dinosaur ring that lights up when you squeeze
or the blockhead plush
that promise to talk and sing when it falls ( why would it be falling?) and that confesses in small print that it has “non-user-replaceable-batteries.”
So if we really wanted something cool we would have to sell 25-34 books and get the Wheel-Running Hamster
…because hey that would be the only "rodent" my daughter would ever get to keep as a pet!
Can’t I just donate $20 to my school and bribe my child with a dollar store toy not to sell anything!
I have an idea why doesn’t this company set up a website where people can order online. When people order there is a box to input the name of the school and the student so they both get credit. Make up business cards that the students hand out to family, friends, and neighbors. That way there is no pressure to buy and I don’t have to collect money.
Sounds easy right? WRONG! Because Happening Books don’t sell themselves…little brown haired blue-eyed girls sell Happening Books to family, friends, and neighbors who would hate to be the reason a cute kindergartner didn’t get a “SUPER BIG 2 INCH SUPER BALL!”
