Chances are, if you spend any time around high-schoolers, you’ve forked over $1 for a World’s Finest Chocolate candy bar.
You also may have been amazed that they still sell for the same price they did when we were hawking them to raise money for our own band or drama club or Beta Club decades ago.
A dollar was a lot of money when I was a kid, so when it was time to turn the money in at the end of the sales period I’d be in a real jam, and so would a lot of the other kids. You see, we had to make up the difference between the chocolate bars that we had actually sold and the other chocolate bars that, ahem, weren’t in the box anymore.
Now in my house whenever I do a load of laundry a World’s Finest Chocolate wrapper falls from the clothes I transfer from the washer to the dryer.
Hmmm. I know what happened there.
My kid is selling those chocolates, and apparently, she’s been buying her share of them, too.
She keeps me informed about how different students are ranking in sales. One girl made a killing by sending the box to work with her parents.
I don’t encounter near the flow of traffic at my job as that other mother does at hers, but I did set the box out on a side table at a board of directors meeting, and proudly held over the $3 that earned to my daughter later that night.
Along with keeping me updated on sales progress, she also gives me a running tally on who got money stolen out of their box. Apparently, this is a big problem these days.
The kids either aren’t issued lockers, or they are issued lockers but the practice of not using lockers has become so standard among students that it does not occur to anyone to store their things in them. Instead, they carry their bookbags and belongings, including those boxes of chocolates, from class to class. When the kids have to leave their stuff at their desks to work on class projects, the eagle-eyed dancing-fingered thieves clean them out.
Three dollars was stolen out of Hunter’s box, she reported first, and now he has to pay that back out of his own money.
Everleigh was missing $8 from her money envelope at the end of groupwork, and now she has to pay that back.
Twelve dollars got gone from Journee’s candy box the next day.
Then, finally: After the joy of a couple of landmark sales that morning, my daughter discovered after groupwork that a whopping $20 was missing out of her box. That loss sure ruined the joy of that morning’s victory; if she had not made that big $12 sale and the other $5 sale, she only would have had to pay $3 in the theft loss.
That discouragement knocked the wind out of her salesmanship for a few days, but then her momentum picked right back up.
Last Sunday’s church service was the Hanging of the Greens, at the end of which everyone present received a gift bag with some fruit and candies — including a World’s Finest Chocolate bar.
My daughter was astounded: Supplying our whole church with candy bars? Why had that not occurred to her? Could that happen again next year, with her as the salesperson?
It won’t be long before she stops carrying around those boxes and I stop finding the crumpled wrappers in the laundry.
But she has an idea:
Why can’t they just sell them all year long?
Sigh.
