It's For a Good Cause

What is it about piece of crap toys that children find so motivating? Have you ever really looked at the prizes! at Chuck E Cheese or an arcade? You have to collect about a thousand tickets to get an inferior stuffed animal or some glow in the dark oversized Frisbee. Think about that for a minute. In order to get a thousand tickets, you have to spend at least ten dollars playing skeeball or the same video games that your child could play at home on the Xbox or Playstation. Only you don’t give them prizes! at home. You only yell at them for playing too many video games. And there is no five or ten dollars’worth of tokens that you could collect, and even if you did, they would borrow that money from you in the first place, so anyway you look at it, you are paying more and more money for them to waste their time not doing homework, reading, or exercising. But as usual, I digress, because the point isn’t the playing of the video games. The point is a child’s desire for winning a piece of crap that costs way more to win than it would to purchase outright.

 This unbalanced prize!-for-cash ratio is even more obvious when it comes to the ubiquitous school fundraiser. The parent-teacher organization decides on some gimmicky thing that no one wants like overpriced wrapping paper or frozen tubs of cookie dough, and then all the parents have to get behind it and be excited and send in checks and even hit up their parents and friends for checks, and at the end of the day, the classrooms might get an extra dry erase board and a functional water fountain. The parent-teacher organization comes up with some idea of how much each child should raise, and while you would rather just write a check for that amount and call it a day, your child won’t allow it. That’s because he or she is judged by their ability to persuade friends and family members to cough up some dough, so they can win prizes! Prizes! always is followed by an exclamation point. Who knew your child was getting a free business education while in elementary school?

 It’s the Gap principle, really. I worked at the Gap for a month after earning my bachelor’s degree, and a good thing it wasn’t in philosophy because I would have gone postal over the Gap sales logic. For them, it wasn’t about how much each customer spent; it was all about how many items were bought. If you sold one jacket for 200 dollars, you were looked down upon by those employees who were able to get a multiple item sale. That’s why they always push socks and belts at the Gap. It’s better to sell a t-shirt, a pair of jeans, and a belt, all on clearance, rather than just one expensive sweater.

That same illogical logic applies to fundraising. At the end of the day, the money needs to be there, but they rather get a hundred dollars from five donors than one five hundred dollar donor. It has something to do with raising awareness. Whatever.

The parent teacher organization doesn’t want Mom and Dad to write a fifty dollar check. They want five different people to write ten dollar checks. And they ensure this happens by awarding your child prizes for getting more people to sign up. Wait a minute, isn’t this the same thing Bernie Madoff did, only without the prizes!? Now it’s all making sense.

 This afternoon, my daughter came home with her spring fundraising brochure. Apparently, the parent teacher organization has figured out that we don’t want any more of their crap, so instead of getting an actual unwanted item for our check, we now are writing checks out of guilt. The fundraiser? As far as I can tell, it’s a fun run. The students are expected to run a number of laps, and the donors will sponsor the laps at a certain dollar amount per lap. The hope is that the students will run anywhere between 25 and 30 laps. The problem, however, is my daughter has no idea what the distance of a lap is. Are we talking four laps is a mile, or 25 laps? Are they running around the school or the gym?Who decided running was fun? And if I sponsor my asthmatic daughter at a dollar a lap, will I owe her four bucks or forty five?

 The prizes!, as you have figured out by now, aren’t based on dollars pledged, but on how many pledges each child gets. The more people my child sucks into this pyramid scheme, the more rubber bracelets and bouncy balls come home with her, and she wants that bouncy ball, dammit!

 When all the homework was done, my daughter got on the phone and called everyone whose phone numbers I knew. Grandparents. Close friends. Aunts and uncles. She left messages in her little girl voice, ignoring the phone script the fundraiser provided in favor of her own confusing words, hoping that each family member would call back and sponsor her. She even let them know that she sucks at running and therefore a per lap pledge would be more cost effective than a flat donation. What she didn’t tell them is that she only qualifies for prizes if she secures per lap donations. So if I write her a check for fifty bucks, she gets nothing. If ten people sponsor her at a dollar a lap, she will be up to her chin in balls. Bouncy balls.

 So if you get a call from my kid, do me a favor and call her back. She doesn’t ask for much, really, just a few bucks per lap. She guarantees it won’t be thirty five laps. And it’s for a good cause: supplementing our tax dollars to cover basic school supplies that the district can no longer afford to buy. Plus, they are promoting health and exercise in our obese lazy children. It’s a win-win, right? I will be so proud of my daughter as she wheezes around whatever the course is, earning money for copier paper and getting bouncy balls and light up markers that will be left on the kitchen counter, never to be touched again until I toss them in the donation pile or the trash can. We can all get behind that, can’t we?