A Sale-ing I won't go

Whenever fall rolls around, we hear the inevitable tolling of school bells. 

     Who knows which bell will toll for thee?  If John Donne only knew.  Funeral bells don't toll for me, at least not yet.  The bells that toll for me, when school starts, are the fundraising bells.

     I remember fund raising from elementary school days.  I remember we had packets of junque to sell. Little trinkets, chintzy chocolates that always looked better in the sale catalog than they did in real life.  They'd have doubled for excellent crayons, they were so waxy.  Someone one year got the bright idea we should sell spices.  Sometimes we sold wrapping paper.

     Seems like there was always a fundraiser in elementary school. I don't know if we were real clear on what the funds were going for, but back in those times it was usually for a field trip.  And back in those days, we were allowed to, told to, go door-to-door to peddle our wares. 

     We'd start out with the immediate neighbors, who usually saved their fundraising support for my sisters and me.  Then we'd branch out down the street, in hopes that other neighborhood kids hadn't gotten there first. 

     We might hope there'd be a family birthday party to go to, and then we could hit up the aunts and uncles.  Of course, if the cousins had something to sell, our parents would be hit up, too.

     Then, decades later, someone decided that kids going door-to-door wasn't such a good idea because there were too many creeps out there.  This changed the face of fund raising for good.

     When my kids brought home the sale catalog, a note came with it encouraging parents to take the sale catalog to work.  The kids should ask family members to purchase items. 

      Of course, there are prizes to be had for the top seller, and the classroom with the most money earned from the sale.

       Those kinds of incentives were around back in the dark ages, when I was selling spices and wrapping paper at the tender age of seven.  My sisters and I never tried too hard, because there were, inevitably, ten kids in our classes whose parents worked at large corporations like General Motors. Parents would gleefully take the catalog and set it out on the break room table, and within days, up to a hundred orders would be placed. 

     Those parents are still around, the kind who will pound the pavement for their child all in the name of winning a glow-in-the-dark necklace or inexpensive bedside radio in the shape of a hamburger.

     More power to them.

      This year, I've done the unspeakable.  My husband says I'm being incredibly rude, considering our neighborhood is home to innumerable children who are involved in all sorts of activities that require fund raising. 

      I say it's a matter of self-preservation.  Plus, I remember the looks my husband would give me, as he'd come home from work and find me captive on my own couch, listening to the door-to-door vacuum salesperson displaying and demonstrating the latest and greatest in vacuums.  They always sounded like a great deal, until you got to that bottom line price.  I sadly had to explain to one salesman that I couldn't afford the vacuum, because what he wanted for it had to go to pay for a new furnace.  He suggested that since my old vaccum was obviously inadequate (in other words, my house was filthy by his vacuum's standards) that it might behoove me to give up the furnace for another year. 

      I was happy to show him the door.

      Then there was the day the incredibly perky book salesgirl came to the door.  She was a college student, hawking the one huge tome that your child would absolutely positively need to get through all the educational endeavors possible in this lifetime.  She was the kind who had paid attention to her training, where the salesperson asks the stunned by overwhelming perkiness buyer what she thinks would be so wonderful about owning this particular book.

       Uh. I don't know.  See, my parents bought one for my sisters and me when I was about seven years old, and I don't think we ever opened it.  It sat on the shelf, alongside the huge dictionary my mom purchased in alphabetical sections from the grocery store and had bound between two covers.  They were hauled out for pint-sized dinner guests to sit on, covered in a towel of course, so they could reach the table and their plates without difficulty. 

     All right. We used the damned books for booster chairs.  

     So getting back to the unspeakable thing I did.

      Recalling my husband's wry looks as he'd see me held slightly unenraptured in my house  by eager salespeople  and my own, obvious inability to say "No," I posted a sign on the front door that stated, simply, "No solicitation, religious or otherwise."

     Oldsters will recall that solicitation doesn't always mean inquiring for sexual activity for pay. 

     I just couldn't handle saying "no" to the bright shiny, red-cheeked, earnest faces that would come to my door, politely pleading for me to purchase something to

• support a sports team from a town 50 miles away
• support a sports team from just two blocks away
• support another sports team from just two blocks away
• support another school fundraiser
• support a good cause for medical research
• support a college student by purchasing encyclopedias we'll never open
• support a religious group's trip to an impoverished nation or neighborhood within our own country
• support someone else's religion that directly contradicts my own
• support local businesses by purchasing a lawn care package that I'm too cheap to want to pay for
• support local businesses by signing on for regular pest control
• purchase beauty products sold by a subdivision resident
• purchase cooking products sold by a subdivision resident
• enroll the children in daycare

    Well, you get the idea.  We live in a nice neighborhood, where people send you their lawn guys, unsolicited, to try and sell you lawn care because yours is the only lawn with weeds within a two block radius.  So the fundraising bug swarms about on a regular basis.

          We still had some solicitation, even after the sign.  I figured that nobody knew what "soliciting" meant in this day and age, and since we didn't typically deal with the religious type of soliciters anymore, I put up a larger sign that simply read, "No Sales. SORRY."

      I still get fliers for various things that are stuck in the newspaper box.  People looking for business still slip a business card in the door. Some people ignore the sign and still ring the bell.

      My husband says what I did is terrible because some day, our kids will likely have to pester the neighbors to purchase something to support some activity they're involved in.

     My personal feeling is that I'd rather pay the extra money and avoid the fund raising, if possible.  I hate asking people to buy things they most likely don't want. 

     Mostly, it's hard to say no to the kids.  I'm happy to support the youth group who came asking for sewing supplies, as they had seen me sewing on something on my front porch one day.  I'm happy to support other good causes.  But I simply can't afford to say "yes" to everyone who comes to the door. 

     So I informed my husband, who has been known to hide when the religious solicitors ring the bell, that he could answer the door from now on and make the executive decision on whether or not to purchase.  And if he wasn't happy about it, I would just change the sign to read, "If you aren't selling chocolate, don't ring the bell."

     Meanwhile, I'm going to hope that someone selling those foot-long candy bars and gummy bears comes to the door. I've got a craving for something sweet.