Oh! That’s called a CurlyWurly where I am.
for a couple of years in the late 80s my school had us selling Hostess products (Twinkies, HoHos, etc) to raise money for the senior class trip to Washington DC. The strange thing is that we only sold them within the school, to our fellow students. Each day we would deposit $5 for a bag of 10 items and sell them during the day. It goes without saying that the kid selling would buy a couple for themselves. How could they not?
But what a horrible scam. Those things were so damn unhealthy and the school probably made very little from each sale.
You can argue that maybe getting experience selling is useful, but does it really count if you are only selling to a captive market of your peers? And in the end, whatever little money is going to the class trip is basically coming from the kids and parents themselves. Why not just ask each for a direct payment and cut Hostess out of the equation?
But damn, I loooved me some Susie Qs…
and as a small aside, one day I gobbled down a couple of Susie Qs right before practice for the cross-country ski team. I overdid it during one sprint exercise and puked the whole thing back up. The irony is that they tasted as awesome coming up as they did going down.
My high school did a few of that sort of fundraiser (pretzels, M&Ms) - but they had a dual purpose. It wasn’t to get experience selling - it was to raise money , of course but it was also our only source of snack food during the school day. Back then, healthy was less important- we still had soda machines. And if we didn’t buy candy in school, we would just buy it before or after.
As for why not a direct payment - your school may have worked differently but in my school it wasn’t every kid selling stuff and there wasn’t any deposit in advance. It was a student organization selling out of their office , so maybe the senior class sold pretzels to the entire 4000 student population to go toward a trip or prom for some of the 800 seniors.
Nothing ever. Schools in Anchorage were funded by the state like they are supposed to be, and at the time the Alaska public school system was one of the best in the country. Sixty years later, that’s changed of course.
Not for school, but I did sell tickets to the church run Strawberry Festival. I was 10 my older sister was 12, our younger brother and sister were 6 and 4. I walked my younger sister and my sister walked my younger brother around the neighborhood. Everyone would buy from a cute 4 year old girl. She and I won the church-wide contest easily. My sister and brother came in second also substantially ahead of others.
In high school I sold study sheets for final exams to my classmates. Again not for the school but for me.
This thread is a great read! (FWIW, I agree with @Chad_Sudan, but that doesn’t make any of the stories less hilarious. Jeff Nickelbag, heh heh heh.)
Speaking of great reading that is on topic, may I highly recommend The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier to anyone who still recalls the pressure of being forced to sell stuff as part of school fundraising?
It’s young adult literature and quite dated now (it was first published in 1974) but it remains one of the best books I’ve ever read. I re-read it every decade or so, especially when I am feeling out of step with the world around me - it is such a comfort to be reminded that other people can feel that way too and can stand up for themselves even when the situation is kind of hopeless.
Never read it but I have seen the filmed version of The Chocolate War.