Let the School Sales Begin - No Neighbor Left Behind When the Kids Go Begging

Enough Already

I just bought $100 in candy. No. I am not a pig. Well, I can be. But, I do not buy candy in bulk. I did this time though, because the pizza and cheese cakes my kid just sold for a school group have not even arrived. I pick him up at school, and he has two big bags of candy. One hundred candy bars. Count 'em. I didn't. I just wrote out the check. My kid just sold over $400 in pizza/cakes, and he is not going door-to-door and hitting the neighbors up for candy when he's not even delivered the other goods.

This is not even the official school beg-a-thon. From what I gather, they decided to send a recorded phone message asking every child to carry in $20. This would be fine if it meant no door-to-door sales. I got hit with this one when the boys were in elementary school. They said to send money. Then, you would not need to worry about school fundraisers. I sent in $20 for each of the boys. I guess I was the only one (or one of the few). A couple of weeks later, I got the Christmas wrapping paper and knickknack sales papers. If the boys didn't sell any of that stuff, they had to sit out on the magic show. Hum . . . I think I did suggest that it sounded like in school suspension. I was told, however, that I was looking at it all wrong. The magic show was a reward for sales. Getting stuck in the room while the others went to the show - priceless I suppose.

This is the season for putting kids on the street. It's not just the schools. The Boy Scouts push that grossly overpriced popcorn. I still have a can from last year. Maybe it will age like fine wine, or maybe I just tossed $15 bucks down the drain. The Scouts do "Friends of Scouting" right on the heels of the popcorn. That's vague. That's because it's money to pay the executives who make starting salaries higher than I make after ten years on the job. I didn't know I needed to apply to a non-profit organization to make a decent salary. I also didn't know that very few Eagle Scouts make it in the Scout organization on the executive level, because they are focused on programs and not on selling popcorn. I learned that when doing research on such programs. The United Way in this area had a huge scandal. I thought it made sense to see where my money might be going. It would probably be better not to know. It's simply hard to turn down a kid selling stuff, and these groups know that and play it.

One question does cross my mind, "What do kids learn from all this selling of stuff that most people don't even need or want?"