The other night I said to my wife, “Let’s go out for dinner.” OK, so what do we want to eat? Nothing that comes in a paper wrapper, I have to be seated when the food is brought to me, and I’m not willing to carry my own drink to my table.
We still can’t decide. So, I reach for the entertainment coupon book, which this year is about as thick as a large-print Bible. If you’re not familiar with the book, it’s a fundraising concept that sells for $35 or less, and is filled with hundreds of coupons for local businesses. About two-thirds of them are restaurants, which in this year’s book total just over 400 coupons. Surely we’ll find something we like!
Flip, flip, flip.
“What about Indian food?” Nah, curry gives me gas. “Mexican?” Nah, the nearest one with a coupon is in Burien, ever since the Issaquah one closed down. “Wok 52 Bistro?” Isn’t that inside a bowling alley?
Flip, flip, flip.
Halfway through the coupon book, I realize that 80 percent of the restaurants are over 20 miles away, and I resolve to toss it out the car window on my next drive up to Lynnwood. I don’t care what the fine for littering is; someone closer to these places can benefit from the “Over $19,000 in savings!”.
I can’t remember what the fundraising effort was that put this book in my hands to begin with. Those of you with kids know how this works, though. You are charged with raising funds for your kids’ extracurricular activities, and the creative geniuses who run those activities came up with something for you to sell in your “spare time” at a 300 percent markup (but usually only 20-40 percent goes to the kids).
My least favorite of these are the $3 candy bars, the $10 tubs of cookie dough, and the magazine subscriptions. I can recognize those fundraising cases and brochures from a distance of about 50 yards, and you’ll know it by the look on my face that says, “You’re not really going to dump this garbage on me are you?”
Your face usually has that hangdog expression, and the first words are usually something like, “I know, I know, I hate this stuff too, but can you just look at it?” I give in every time, not out of guilt or true benevolence, but because I know what a hassle it is to schlep this stuff onto your friends. I will make you suffer through my gold pass idea, though.
I tell everyone who brings me these fundraisers that they need to start a gold pass program, and I’ll just give you $50 up front for a gold pass that exempts me from all fundraising for your organization. Just come up with a dollar-store, gold-painted plastic coin that says gold pass on it, and I’ll wear dozens of them around my neck like Mr. T.
One of these school fundraising organizers told me that if every kid showed up with $20 at the beginning of the year, they wouldn’t need to do fundraising at all. That seems like such a tiny amount of money, and an incredibly inefficient use of volunteer labor to manage and sell these fundraising ideas. I don’t think we actually calculate the true economic cost of these programs, and if you counted up the time you’ve spent selling this stuff, you’d find that you’re working for much less than minimum wage. Maybe you could just stay at work another hour, then just hand over that money instead.
Everyone needs to raise funds. Schools, kids sports programs, music programs, charities, churches, service clubs, hospitals, cities, counties, states, and countries. We like to think that somebody else will pay, or those greedy corporations will pay, but the reality is that you pay. And I pay. So can’t we just drop this silly dance and get me a gold pass?
