Around here, it’s usually a (rather good) local chocolatier called Malley’s. Their storefronts also sell ice cream, and every candy bar wrapper includes a coupon for buy-one-get-one-free hot fudge sundaes. They can be sold for the school as a whole, or for individual clubs. When I was subbing in a very large public high school, often a kid would stand up at the start of class and ask “Who’s selling Malley’s bars right now? I’m hungry”.
Occasionally, a less-savvy school will instead sell World’s Finest Chocolate, which has gimmicky prizes for top sellers. And despite the name, it’s really bad chocolate, too.
We sold light blubs too, for the high school band. The money was for field trips and band uniforms. I don’t remember selling anything else for the public schools, just that one thing for an extracurricular activity.
Clothes pegs. I hated those stupid compulsory fundraising drives. As a kid with crippling anxiety, it was a nightmare to go up to strangers and ask for money.
A lot of other kids also participated in the 40hr Famine, but that was often knocked down to 20hrs which only amounts to missing dinner and then breakfast the next day, barely a challenge. And now that I think about it, that whole shebang makes me uncomfortable.
I’m a little younger but these things were ALWAYS promoted as “fundraisers” when I was in school in the '80s/'90s and extended to outside school activities such as Scouts and Little League.
In school we mostly used catalogs that sold a variety of items and then you picked up your orders on a certain date. The most popular one seemed to be close to Christmas and things like candy and wrapping paper were popular.
When my kids were in school they had to sell some really awful crap, including gift wrap. I took a hard stand that my kids were not bothering the neighbors, so I bought whatever the minimum was, then either used it or gave it away.
I had to sell boxes of chocolate-covered almonds for a youth bowling league. I just bought all of them myself, and then my mom proceeded to buy a bunch of them off of me one box at a time.
As a kid, it was the Beich candy bars and giant pizza-sized cookies. The candy bars was mainly me eating candy until payment day, then digging through the couch cushions to cover my indulgences.
My son gets walk-a-thon style things and selling wrapping paper. The school also allows for a direct donation in order to participate in the reward tiers, so I just cut them the minimum-sized check (about $30) to get my kid into the bouncy castle party and call it done.
I was supposed to sell all manner of garbage for the Catholic elementary school I went to. Since all of my many siblings and a lot of our friends went to the same school our customer base was limited to old people without kids in school and aunts and uncles. We didn’t manage to sell much.
Our kids were asked to sell all manner of garbage for the PTA but I told them they’re not doing it and we made a donation to the PTA instead. The PTA benefited much more from a direct donation than the small cut they got from sales.
The only time one of the kids sold anything was when the school had a mattress sale. Yes, that’s a thing. A company filled the cafeteria with crappy, overpriced mattresses and tried to sell them. Our son needed a new mattress and I couldn’t convince my wife that the mattress sale was a rip-off so we ended up buying one. Our daughter got a nice hoodie for selling a single mattress. I think selling two would have gotten her an iPod or something of real value but we were lucky enough finding one sucker. There was no way we would find another.
Chocolate bars I think. Thing was, everyone in my class lived in my neighborhood, so everyone already had a box of these things. I just didn’t even bother and turned in the whole box when the week was up.
Elementary school (k-6, then the school shut down) World’s Finest Chocolate (I remember it being decent then, but I assume it was either actually bad then or it’s gone downhill in quality. Either is possible).
7-8 grade, maybe candles? I don’t actively remember selling anything those two years.
High school - oranges, as part of the band.
I graduated HS in 1991, so I don’t remember there being a lot of selling for schools growing up. My younger brother, 8 years younger than me, sold all kinds of things. Wrapping paper, definitely candles, maybe candy…all during the elementary years.
Yeah, but if you didn’t sell enough for the 3D baby Jesus, you’d only get the two dimensional Baby Jesus. And you don’t want t limit your deity to only two dimensions.
The house where I grew up was within walking distance of one of the Malley’s parlors, and my family occasionally had ice cream there, but I never sold Malley bars. However…
I did (not very successfully) sell some of that stuff. I remember it tasting pretty good, but my palate wasn’t as sophisticated at fourteen as it is a half-century later.
I also sold a few magazine subscriptions through QSP, which was a program affiliated with Reader’s Digest. I remember that among the periodicals available, the “Holy Grail” was the Wall Street Transcript, which sold for something like $200 when Sports Illustrated (which my youngest sibling purchased from me) went for about a tenth of that.
Chocolate bars for an all boys Catholic school run by religious brothers. It was like a real life “The Chocolate War”…although I never got beaten up for not selling them.
There seems to be a huge emphasis on chocolate and candy in these sales. Twenty years ago, when our daughter was in high school, they took out the machines in the hall that dispensed “unhealthy” products.
All sorts of stuff, different every year. Magazine subscriptions, seeds, assorted greeting cards, cheese/cracker/sausage sets, frozen pizzas, salt water taffy. I have always been very outgoing and I won the prize for most sales every year except two (one year I tied, the other I came in second by just 3 sales).
They were in the stores back then, but not for very long. 2 years or so. They were a twisty caramel bar covered in chocolate. The caramel was always a tad too hard and all the chocolate cracked off as you tried to eat it. If you tried to warm it up just a bit in your pocket it quickly turned into a sticky gooey blob. In theory it should have been a pretty good candy bar. In reality it was a god damn mess!