My daughter is going on a trip for school. In order to cover some of the costs of the trip, her school has her baking things to raise money. One of the emails explains:
We made $105 at the bake sale today, so great job. I am thinking about having a bake sale every week for the next month and seeing how we do. We owe a ton of money in tip fees and this is proving to be a great way of making money. As of right now, each student (without bake sales) would owe somewhere between $75-100 in tip money. After bake sales (should we have one every week) this fee should be reduced to almost nothing. I was hoping to make $1000, but I think we can do much better than that. So, this coming Monday we will have another bake sale. I will send out the list of bakers tomorrow.
Of course, we (the parents of the bakers) have to buy the ingredients and they don't account for that, either in terms of the cost of the ingredients or the time it takes my daughter—and sometimes her mom—to be going to the store. They don't account for the time spent preparing and baking, nor the fuel required to run the oven, nor any other incremental wear and tear on the oven. They don't account for the fact that when it's all baked, our daughter often says “gee, this is a lot of stuff to carry, can you drive me to school?” That takes time and costs gas. And then there is the time it takes to stand around and sell the things.
I saw fifteen names on the list of bakers emailed by the teacher. That means the bake sale, having made $105, grossed about $7 per baker. Let's be generous and assume the ingredients were bought in a very frugal way and that fuel is quite cheap, so we'll guess cost of goods at $3 or $4. That means all the labor made well below minimum wage. Whether that constitutes a profit is highly questionable.
I'd rather just pay the $75-100 the teacher thinks she's saving us from. I think it would be cheaper.
No wonder our country has a failing economy if this is a kid's exposure to entrepreneurism.
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Comments
I think it teaches kids absolutely nothing about money. And about selling magazines! What about all the gasoline used up driving around trying to sell them!
No matter how maddening teens can be, I am SOOO glad these days are behind us!
Boy, you really got me started this morning...
RIF (hmm, interesting initials you have there), yeah, I thought about including raffle tickets, Girl Scout cookies, and all that in here because it's a related topic. I decided to keep it short because it seems to get to a place where I lose readers. But you're certainly in scope mentioning these things.
Well written post.
And if you sell the tenth one... you get a sticky thing that sticks to the wall when you throw it...
As a teacher I found it exploitative and I hated it... if it had bought me a computer I could have used, I wouldn't have minded. The technology funds... don't know where they went.
I agree, this seems like a lot of time and energy just to raise a few bucks, and probably costs more than what it earns.
I used to have a similar problem with the company picnic. Every year we were supposed to make something for the company picnic. Well, I hated the company picnic and wanted to get out of it altogether.
So this is what I finally did -- every year I would go to the organizer of the company picnic and say "I don't want to go to the picnic nor do I want to make food for it. I don't want to be invited to it or hear about it in any way. So here's the deal -- I'm going to buy my freedom. You're going to give me a number, and I'll pay you that number in money, and you can take that money and buy food with it or whatever you want. In exchange for the money you agree to never talk to me about the company picnic again."
And it worked. The organizer would ask for 20 or 30 bucks, I'd pay it, and be gloriously free from the company picnic for another year. You might try that with the bake sale teacher.
The latest insult here was being told a week before my daughter is to go and represent her school at Model Congress that the fees we've already paid don't include meals for four days and that we should send them with $100. Where do I begin with my disgust about that? Is a hundred dollars going to buy twelve meals? Could someone have told me about this weeks ago? Couldn't this cost have been factored into the cost to attend? and the ever popular Why do you think I have an extra hundred just lying around?
Thanks for letting me get that off my chest and thanks for the post. I gave it a profit-filled rating without any baked goods in sight.
I hate the whole organization and school-sponsored selling, but I'm afraid to say it does work. The economics of it are not quite sound, but they do raise money.
Perhaps because people and money are inherently irrational. I've seen it in action. If you set up a table asking for donations or just write to the parents, you don't get a terribly good response. If you sell donuts and brownies, or better yet, set up shop and ask people to donate whatever they can in exchange for the baked goods, they will.
Same with silent auctions. People will gladly write checks for hundreds of dollars, because they feel they are getting something valuable (a spa treatment, dinner out, basket of cool stuff) in return so they can justify it.
One other point that I've heard (and I'm not quite sure how I feel about) is that having the kids participate by selling gives them a stake in the outcome. And, as much as it makes infinitely MORE SENSE for me to write a check for $50 to the Girl Scout troop than it does for me or dh to spend an hour on 3 different Saturdays outside the Giant grocery store with the girls selling the damn cookies for which their troop gets $0.50 per box, there is something to be learned in that experience. I guess.
I'm still not convinced, but people DO buy the cookies and she does invest the time.
Just this year, most of the classes changed to a "one-check" system, at the beginning of the year. The parent group for each class just asks for a single total donation at the beginning of the year, to cover all the expected expenses throughout the year.
Needless to say, most of the parents were thrilled, both with the efficiency, and with not being constantly hounded.
For our class it would be more simple to ask for 10$ a semester- flat rate for everyone, and everyone would have the pining and grad ceremony, buffet, party, you name it free. The problem with bake sales is they burn out the willing, and the shirkers get as much reward as the producers. So, along with it just not being cost effective, it's also socially annoying.