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Bars to Dollars

by Racheal
(Jersey City NJ USA)

I've been doing fundraising for over twenty years for churches, youth groups, and athletic teams, and one product that seems to work well is candy. Usually, the name brand bars of candy work best, because people usually know the taste already. The profits seem to work out well and the participants really don't have to put much effort into the sales pitch. Young and old can raise quick cash selling these candy bars, in less than two weeks. This is how we turned a quick profit for a Girl Scout troop.

Troop 284 in Irvington NJ, was a small group of girls that did not do very well during the annual cookie sale. One of the reasons was there were so many more troops in Newark and the surrounding areas, and Irvington is a small town with employees leaving the town, the cookies that were brought, were sold to the residents outside the community. This posed a problem for the girls, who depended on the money to attend a weekend of fun at camp. The troop leader and parents tried to come up with ways to raise the needed $600 for the 10 girls but could not come up with any feasible ideas.

My coworker has a girl in this troop and she was telling me the story and I suggested selling candy bars,mixed choices, and even agreed to help. I set them up with a company that gave you 30 days to pay and the cases were there by the end of the week. I took a case to work, set it in the break room, with a locked money box and watched those bars disappear by days end(there are 1400 people employed at my job). Each day, I took on another box, each time a different assortment, to find them gone by the end of the day. The profit from each box was $40 per case.Within two weeks, the troop had the money, with enough left over to take the girls on another trip the leader had desired for the girls. She took them to New York to see the Broadway production of Hairspray (of course the tickets were discounted $15 per person). The girls loved it.

So to make a quick profit, try the candy bar sales, they really work.