That’s the reason my father always gave for not taking Girl Guide cookies into work to sell some for me - he was the boss, and he didn’t want to make anyone feel pressured into buying anything they didn’t want. I wasn’t entirely happy with it at the time, since it reduced the amount that I “personally” sold, but in retrospect it was good since it forced me to take more initiative to try to sell the things.
Luckily, at my current workplace there aren’t really any people flogging things for their children. Everyone knows who to go to if they want Girl Guide cookies, but she doesn’t make a big deal out of it, and there’s absolutely no pressure. So far I haven’t run across anybody doing school or sports team fundraisers for their kids in the six months I’ve been there, which is kind of amazing given the number of people with school-aged children.
I will buy fundraising goods sold door-to-door from kids I know – or occasionally from unfamiliar representatives of familiar organizations. But not infrequently teenaged boys will work my neighborhood with a well rehearsed spiel for an organization I’ve never heard of or that they’re reluctant to name. (Curiously, they often have a slavic accent.) I always get the feeling that it’s some kind of Faginesque scam.
As for solicitations at work, I’ve thought of keeping a stock of trinkets or candy on hand which I can claim I’m selling for fundraising. Then when I’m solicited, I could offer just to barter for some of my worthless (or empty-caloried) stuff.
That’s pretty…well, damned dismaying for one who’s a former Scout. The big whoop-de-doo things–national ‘camps’ and such–were always out of reach but I always believed all those sales paid for our activities with some to spare. Now that I think of it, our major camping excursion was to my uncle’s farm*. It was a blast but we had to rustle up our own tents. Is there some sort of fee or priority for the big organized camps? The purchase prices and insurance must add up to something.
Day-um. Scouting gave me a solid base in a lot of things: basic first aid**, how to wire a lamp, the basics of sanitation by way of latrine pits onto everyday applications, starting a fire from scratch, whipping together decent food–complete with bisquits, bacon, eggs and fixin’s–in a cast-iron dutch oven over a fire, care of Swiss Army knives and making a bed with hospital corners on the sheets so a dime would bounce.
Shit.
** We also got fast practice in first aid because the sparkling stream and deep water hole housed leeches. They were the icky offset to the crawdads.
Actually now that I think about it we have no rules about it at all and although there are hundreds of people where I work, only the ones I am particularly friendly with would ever ask me directly for sponsorship for a walkathon or sell me raffle tickets for their kid. I assume their are little cliques all over the building where groups of people help each others kids out. Saleable fund raising materials are just left in the tearooms with an envelope. Mostly when I buy a CK I don’t even notice which school or group I am helping.
I remember getting in trouble at intermediate school {this was 25 odd years ago} for refusing to participate in selling stuff to fund the school - back then it was clothespegs and potscrubs, for some arcane reason - no way was I going door to door or hitting up friends and family to shill for some crap I figured the school {I later worked out it was the Education Department, aka the Guvmint} should pay for anyway: call it laziness or call it cynicism, but I just didn’t do it.
What got me was how competitive it was, and how much the teachers encouraged this - there was a chart posted in each classroom of who had sold the most, and I took a perverse pride in consistently being at the bottom, with zero sales. Ever. My report that year revealed that I was not a “team player” - I saw myself more as a rugged individualist. Needless to say, my education sucked.
I don’t mind at work when there’s a box of Sarris chocolates sitting in the faculty lounge with a sign that says ‘$1.00 in the envelope, on the honor system.’ and whoever wants the candy bar can get one and stick a buck in the envelope. In fact, a lot of the times we ask people if their kids are selling Sarris because the candy bars cost the same as they do where Sarris is sold, they’re really good, and at least in this case there’s money going to whatever the fundraiser is for.
It’s like, here are these delicious candy bars that cost no more than they do at the store, and without the inconvenience of actually having to leave the office to get them!
The ones that bother me are the parents who actually schlep their kid around the offices with an order form. having the kid knock on your office door and ask you to buy stuff for their daycare or whatever it is fundraiser. At least if you say no to a door-to-door kid, you probably don’t have to see that kid’s parent every day. At work it’s like, if I say no to the kid, they cry, and then mom or dad sees me at work as the nasty one who made their little snookums cry.
I actually don’t mind too much. At our work, a sign-up sheet is hung by the secretary’s desk. If it is something I will use or can find a way to use, I will buy it. I bought girl scout cookies. I didn’t buy the subs 'cause I didn’t want one. I bought the candy. I didn’t buy the rice crispy wrapper wallet (Huh?). Most of the time, I will buy. For the subs I offered to contribute, but just didn’t want one of those lame-ass subs. For the rice crispy wrapper wallet, I thought it was so amazingly bad of an idea that I refused to even offer to contribute.
Oh, yeah, there were ‘fulltime’ camping locations that were subsidized by the Council (The one I remember is Cedar Hill, in Newton, MA) – that’s part of what I was including under ‘other management’ expenses. I’m not sure what you mean by ‘fee or priority’, but in essence the camp was a huge chunk of land in the middle of a very expensive housing area – even with charity breaks on taxes, it must have cost a very nice sum to maintain all the buildings and paths so forth.
On the ‘using’ end, the troop leader could reserve various sized areas/activities within it for camping trips. There’s a huge barn like building with kitchen and bathrooms for the ‘not really up to roughing it’ crowd, wooden platform tents for the next level, all the way up to 'pick a chunk of forest and unroll your sleeping bags. There were open meadows, fairly steep rocky cliffy bits to climb, a pond to row on, swimming pools, and on and on. It was really a very nice camp.
The troops that used the area had to pay fees based on what kind of area & how long they wanted it, of course, but undoubtedly those fees would have been higher if the Council weren’t contribuing sizeable chunks of money for the insurance and taxes.
That was a local camp, of course. I never had any doings with the national level camps and such, except I’m fairly sure there were a few ‘scholarships’ that could be applied for, if you were relatively broke and an active GS.
BTW, I didn’t mean to imply the distribution of the cookie sales profit was an evil scheme: the GSA is a fairly large organization, and keeping it running isn’t something that can be handled by a few hours of part time work by scattered moms. It takes trained professionals working full time, and they simply have to be paid.
But I really hated that ‘you’ve got to sell the tickets’ law. One of the years I was a senior we wanted to take a trip to England, which was going to take serious money raising, and at 10 cents a box, it would never happen. Our leader tried to get some sort of exemption – as in, find out how much the average troop raised for the council by selling cookies, and we would donate that amount from what our fundraiser actually was – but no go.
So we decided to do the cookies in a minimal way – one day only, sell 'em off a table, nothing but Cookie Mints for simplicity. It turned out to be almost funny: there was an army base that abutted our town. With lots of young soldiers on base, mostly cut off from the comforts of home and fast food. And Bachelor Officer housing, sort of ditto.
Let me tell you, single men in that situation will buy cookies from cute girls (15 to 17ish in age) at an amazing clip. Heck, they’d probably have bought canned lima beans! We’d ordered something like 50 cases, or 600 boxes. Figuring that was pretty much the least the Council would let us get away with, and that we wouldn’t have too many ‘leftovers’ for our parents to buy (you don’t return the unsold boxes, one reason troops used to do the ‘preorder’ method.)
Anyway, we set up a table right outside of one of the gates (yes, with permission) at 9 am on a Saturday. We were packing up to go home by a little after 10, with every single box gone.
Hey, at least in those cases the kid is putting forth some of the effort. I’ve got no problem at all with people bringing their kids in and letting them make the rounds. It provides the kids with a safe environment to learn how to approach people they don’t necessarily know confidently, and it teaches them that while Mommy and Daddy are happy to help them, Mommy and Daddy have zero intention of doing all the work for them. I think that’s great, and I wish that’s how my coworkers approached it.
But no, I come in to a box of candy or an order form and a big ol’ honkin’ sign saying that Precious Moppet X is selling for Y and it’s a really, really, really, really good cause and won’t we please, please, PLEASE think of the children and buy something? It’s ever so important to dear little Moppet. These signs are invariably in adult handwriting. Moppet is apparently too overcome with emotion about the fundraiser to even hold a pen for two minutes. :rolleyes: Great lesson to teach your kids, folks–they can just sit on their butts and let Mommy and Daddy do all the work, and then they can reap the rewards. Yes, that will really serve them well later in life.
See the reason I don’t like it is because they trot little Snottums in and make them ask you, because you know that if you say no and Snottums cries, you’ll feel like shit.
It’s a ‘You don’t want Snottums to cry because you were too mean to buy Snottums’s wares, right?’ thing.
When I buy Girl Scout cookies – and I must, I sold enough of the damn things I think it’s only fair that I get to eat them now! – I always give an extra couple of bucks on top of the cookies. I didn’t know about the miserable profit margin on them when I was selling, but I do now.
If they aren’t allowed to sell door-to-door, then their options are awfully limited. Nobody goes door-to-door anymore. Occasionally one of the little girls across the street will come selling chocolate bars (yum!) but they are neighbors. The last few years I’ve bought cookies from girls set up outside of grocery stores, and I’m not in an office where I can be subjected to other people’s pleas on behalf of their kids.
On the one hand, this is fine. But I have 5 nephews and 4 nieces. Two years ago, one of my nephews sent us a pamphlet describing how we could help raise money for his school by subscribing to magazines. I’m all for helping out the school, and I like a good magazine now and again, plus I have 2 kids of my own who will one day need money for their school, so I subscribed to a magazine. Great.
Last year, two nephews (in 2 different families) sent pamphlets describing how we could help raise money for their schools by subscribing to magazines.
If we continue at this rate, by the time my kids are in school, I won’t be able to afford the postage stamps to send pamphlets to their aunts and uncles.
It really sucks for those kids whose parents don’t work in an office type environment. I’m a SAHM and my husband is gone on business at least half the year. Who exactly am I supposed to flog this shit to? And it is complete and utter shit, dollar store knickknacks for 10-20 bucks? Yeah right. I just refuse and write the school a check instead.
I never made any sales from band fundraisers because my parents work at home. Everyone else had their parents bring in the stuff and sell for them, but I would buy a box of chocolate for myself and coerce my mom into buying something, and that would be all. It wasn’t fair, because it made me look like a bum when I was doing just as much work as the people who gave the forms to their parents to bring to work.
I will not buy from some parent who hands out the worksheet - if you want me to buy things from the Girl Scouts/Boy Scouts/Campfire/whatever, I need to see the actual kid. And I will buy from the actual kid.
I have no problem with the parents bringing her around. But the signup sheet or candy box rubs me exactly the wrong way. It feels like corporate extortion where the parent is doing all their kid’s work for them.
Eh, I figure if Snottums is so sheltered and delicate that a polite “No, thank you,” is going to bring on tears, that ain’t my fault. If Snottums is shilling something I happen to want, I buy something. If there’s nothing there I want, the kid gets an important life lesson in dealing with disappointment. Either way, the child benefits. Granted, he probably won’t like the latter benefit, but oh well.
There’s also the possibility that the parent is sheltered and delicate too. And will likely not understand why you didn’t buy Snottums cookies. Even though it isn’t your fault, they may still form and uninformed opinion on you based on some fucking cookies. And hopefully this sheltered person isn’t your boss.
That would be my outlook if littlecats ever wants to do the GS thing. No, I wouldn’t expect her to go door-to-door alone, I’d be waiting at the end of the walk, close enough to afford safety, and far enough that she’s learning the things spoken of by Rilchiam. Then if someone is rude or nasty, I can explain why some folks are that way, and how you need to shake it off and start over.
Can you tell that I’ve done a lot of cold calling in the past?
