1. King-size gas station candy is disgusting. Do you know what’s in a king-size package of Reese’s cups? 407 calories, 37.26 grams of sugar and 24.12 grams of fat, that’s what. We have a child obesity epidemic in this country, and rather than having a wellness-based fundraiser like, say, a walk-a-thon (where the school profits on almost 100% of the donations), we are filling our cupboards with enough chocolate to break a young, healthy pancreas. And it’s not even good chocolate! The school used to sell human-portioned chocolate bars from a small, family-owned company where you at least felt good about supporting a local business and purchasing something with a high-quality, small batch message. But this? If I can buy it at Sheetz, I don’t want to buy it from a second-grader.
2. The school only makes half the profit and parents have to hound acquaintances to buy overpriced shit they don’t need or want. I know you have to spend money to make money, and I’m sure product sales offer a quick-turn opportunity for schools to make a decent amount of money in a short period of time (uh... three weeks for us with little advance notice that this big spending was coming right before a major holiday) with very little effort. But it sure is putting a lot of effort and expense on the parents (many of whom, mind you, have multiple kids and are in a public school system to begin with because they can’t afford a lot of out-of-pocket school expenses.) In most product-based fundraisers, the school only makes $0.55 – $0.65 to the dollar… you can certainly see how it leaves many parents thinking, “Can I just pay the school $30 instead of buying $60 worth of chocolate?”
Oh, and at $2 a bar, gargantuan gas station candy bars that represent a quarter of your daily calorie intake aren’t so easy to push off on coworkers in today’s corporate offices where employees are more interested in Fitbit challenges and paleo recipe swaps than they are in increasing their risk of heart disease.