My grade 7 class sold orders for oranges and grapefruits door-to-door to raise money for a trip to France, and we got a cut to use as our spending money on the trip. I’m so old I remember CDN$100 lasting me for two weeks in France (granted, I was billetted with a family that fed me) whereas now when I travel to Europe it’s orders of magnitude more, though I s’pose I don’t have an eleven-year-olds low standards now.
I’m curious how the almond industry got such a toehold in the biz that 99% of the candy I see sold door-to-door, or outside of malls, or in the subway, is chocolate-covered almonds, because I can’t stand those.
One of the most embarrassing things that happened to me in high school was knocking on a friend’s door to offer him a ride to some event. His mom answered the door and I asked if Jeff was home. She said she’d get him, “Oh, and tell me, why do you kids all call my Jeffrey “Nicklebag”?”
I said because that’s his nickname, and just stood there. She waited a minute, then went to fetch nicklebag.
I didn’t go to school so didn’t have to / get to sell stuff to raise money for whatever extracurricular things the school wouldn’t pay for but I was in Camp Fire, a sort of co-ed Boy Scout organization. We sold candy to raise money for the program, candy that I remember being quite good. Almond Roca was a big seller. My mom loved Almond Roca and IIRC was my biggest client. I hated selling so basically did bupkis during candy selling season (which was right before Christmas IIRC) while my buddies earned all sorts of prizes.
When my kids were in Boy Scouts they sold candy bars, popcorn, and coupon books. The candy bars brought in the most money while the coupons were a total failure. I don’t think people use paper coupons much these days.
I still buy Girl Scout cookies whenever I see some young lass outside a grocery store with a table of goodies set up but that seems to be something I have seen less frequently the last few years.
Wholeheartedly agree. I hate almonds as well as walnuts, both of which seem to be ubiquitous in candy that have nuts. They aren’t cheap – well, almonds aren’t anyway – and pistachios or cashews would be such a better choice, flavor-wise.
I now teach in a boarding school and there are no fundraisers of any sort. The students’ black-market economy, however, is quite healthy.
Yes, door-to-door sales of magazine subscriptions in 7th grade.
Looking back, I consider it exploitation. Granted, it was voluntary, but at its core, it was a corporation taking advantage of kids’ energy and naivete. The company got access to child labor in return for cheap “prizes” – and all with the school’s cooperation. If my child’s school tried this today, I would lodge a strong protest. (Fundraisers for extracurriculars are a different matter.)
I learned very early in life that I had no calling as a salesman (“Hi Mrs. Brown. You don’t want to buy any seeds, do you?”) I hated the “all school projects.” In elementary school they had us selling magazine subscriptions. The problem was that I lived in a town with fewer than 2,000 residents, one school and lots of kids, so the town got saturated pretty quickly. There was this girl up the street who would hit every household within a 10 block radius within an hour of getting home from school, leaving the rest of us with the dregs. My parents would buy subscriptions to “The Saturday Evening Post” and “Reader’s Digest” and that would be it for me. Selling to the parents was probably the object anyway. I think it was a real nasty racket to subject young children to.
We sold a lot of candy when I was in high school. I don’t remember what the money was used for. We had good candy–not like the cheap chocolate fundraiser bars that people sell now. We sold gummy bears, M&Ms, Tootsie Pops and Blow Pops. I was my best customer. It was nice to have a steady supply of candy while we were doing fundraisers.
In high school I sold Blowpops, which were lolipops with gum in the middle, or something similarly horrible. I carried around the box for half a year, but I’m sure I never even tried one. At $0.25 each, they sold pretty well to a series of regular customers who couldn’t smoke during class (I assume, because I can’t think of any other reason to eat them).
I think the sales funded the Latin Club trip to the Roman Orgy[1] dinner at the Magic Time Machine restaurant in Austin.
a prix fixe meal, where meat and fruits are served to you by Princess Leia and a pirate ↩︎
My school band/ choir sold candy bars. I seem to recall the profit was used to fund field trips. (We went to some state thing where a bunch of choirs sang together).
My parents used to complain about all the “thons” that we had. Started with “Read-a-thon” for which you go to your neighbors and ask them to pledge a quarter or whatever for each book you read within a certain timeframe. Then there were “walk-a-thons” and “dance-a-thons” and my church youth group even had a “rock-a-thon” once which was, everybody brings a rocking chair to the church basement and stay up all night rocking it continuously. Strangely, they also did a “wake-a-thon” the following summer, which kicked off with a tiring afternoon at the beach, so everyone washed out about sixteen hours in (looking back now, isn’t this psychological warfare?).
My private school had a magazine sale for the 5th-8th graders every year. As little kids we looked forward to being able to do it. There was always a healthy competition to see who could sell the most (really, it was to see whose dad could sell the most at his work).
My church had a boy scout-type group for 3rd-8th grade boys, and one year we went door to door selling light bulbs. That blows my mind to think about now. This would’ve been the mid- to late-80s.
When I was in middle and high school choir, we used to have newspaper collection drives every month. It was fun to be together at the school liading the bales into packing crates. It paid enough money to buy our shirts, pants and shoes for the next year.
Just bought some frozen pizzas from a neighborhood kid yesterday.
I asked if she could take a check as I don’t keep cash around the house. “No-no-no” she said and I could tell she was tired of explaining to another “old” person how it’s done these days. She pointed to a QR code on the bottom of her brochure and told me to scan it. Took me to a website where I ordered and paid with a credit card (or ApplePay in my case) and she said “thanks!” and high-tailed it out of there.
I did the math-- that amounts to 961 sales. Gotta love your work ethic, anyway!
I don’t remember if it was school-related or as a cub scout, but I remember going door-to-door selling varied crap out of a catalog to raise money for something. One of the things you could buy was a lamp that consisted of a base and light bulb with a yellow smiley face globe over the bulb. So that kind of quality stuff.
To raise money for a 6th grade trip to Toronto we had to sell costume jewelry out of a catalog. It was probably crappy stuff, and being a boy I had no inclination whatsoever to go door-to-door to sell jewelry, so I think my parents just ponied up my share of the $$ to allow me to go.
I also sold seeds, but that was my personal kid thing to make some extra money, not for school. I think I made a grand total of $6 before I gave that up. I was just not a natural-born salesman.
One year when I was in Boy Scouts, we sold road flares as a fundraiser. You wouldn’t think that would be very popular, but we had a deal with a local car wash that had a line of cars on weekends. I guess they were a captive audience in an automotive frame of mind, because we sold a shit ton of those things.
When you are in a town of 600, and every farm and half the homes in town have kids in school, selling door to door really doesn’t work. (at least the homeowners didn’t shoot you back then!)
I think I did it one year, sold two (somethings) to my mom, and that was that. never again!
I got a lot of anxiety about it. When adults tell you to do something at that age, it’s stressful when you don’t want to/aren’t comfortable with it. Takes a while before you get secure enough to tell them no.
Yes! The Kathryn Beich caramel bars! I remember selling those (for Cub Scouts? little league? something like that).
I also got to tour their candy factory in Bloomington, IL at some point. They were fairly generous with the free samples. I don’t remember seeing any Oompa-Loompas, though.
When I was in high school in German club, we sold German candy, including gummi bears (back when they weren’t available anywhere else), Toblerones, and gummi worms (for a nickel each—they practically sold themselves).
It was nice to have a steady supply of candy while we were doing fundraisers.