Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Another School Year, Another Sales Quota to Meet

By Bob Wire, 9-24-08

	"Speaker's the name, gift wrap is my game!"

It’s that wonderful time of year again: the leaves are starting to turn, there’s a crisp nip of autumn in the air, and the legion of gift wrap sales midgets is about to be unleashed on the city.

Yes, the biggest school fundraiser of the year has been sent home in every grade schooler’s backpack. Each fall elementary school students are drafted into a mammoth Kathryn Beich sales force, and every year it pisses me off for a number of reasons.

In case you have no grade schoolers in your orbit, it works like this: a collection of Lillian Vernon rejects is assembled and presented in a glossy catalog as if these items were rare treasures gathered from years of traveling the exotic ports of the world. On page 33 there’s a frog-shaped thermometer that suction-cups to your window. Priceless! And what’s this on page 21? A plastic strainer for cans of tuna! Brilliant! And what holiday get-together would be complete without a Cup O’ Cheddar (page 50)? Inconceivable! It’s a whole catalog of stuff that’s so useless and weird that you just can’t find it anywhere else.

And of course the main attraction is the gift wrap. Of course, everybody needs gift wrap. You can’t wrap presents in the Sunday funnies forever. So they give you samples of a dozen or so festive holiday (well, if your holiday is Christmas) designs to choose from, and six weeks later the kids will schlep it to your door. Now, I suppose you could pop into Kmart and snag about three square acres of the stuff for less than a sawbuck. But who would benefit from such a selfish move?  We’re trying to raise money here! For the same ten bucks, you could buy enough Kathryn Beich top quality paper to wrap, say, a carton of cigarettes. And the money would be going toward the PTA of your local grade school, to fund field trips or buy doors for the bathroom stalls. Smoke up, Johnny!

And now there are separate catalogs for jewelry, chocolate, and items assembled by various third-world work forces including—I swear to god—cell phone holders and money clips.

But it’s not the dime-store goods themselves or their overblown presentation that chaps my hide. It’s the way the company preys on the inherent greed of all the grade schoolers who will eventually sluff all the responsibility off on their parents anyway. They dangle “valuable” prizes as incentive to get out there and sell, sell, SELL! Last year one of my kids sold enough stuff to earn a “personal AM/FM radio.” It looked like it came out of a gumball machine, and broke before the first AA battery wore down. Who in the hell listens to AM radio anyway?

This year if a kid sells seven items, she gets something called a ZeeBeez, which is a rubber dome that looks like Wonder Woman’s diaphragm. You turn it inside out and set it on the floor, and after a few deliciously suspenseful seconds it pops back into shape, jumping into the air and making dreams come true for everyone in the room. I would bet it’s some kind of manufacturing byproduct.

If a particular plucky saleschild manages to move 100 items, he or she will be the proud owner of a Home Theater Surround Sound System! It is manufactured by Panascenic, a company with which I am not familiar. And if a kid sells a hefty 150 items, he or she will be the proud owner of a 15” LCD HDTV from Suny. These treasures are pictured in blazing, lip-smacking color so the kids will actually start selling as soon as they get on the bus home (“Hey, Otto, don’t you need a can of chocolate pretzels?” “Whoa, little dude!”)

The minute they come bursting through the door, they are chattering about the iPud they’re going to win, or how they’re going to outsell everyone in their class. Used to be the kids would go door-to-door, but sex offenders and meth lab-guarding pit bulls put an end to that. So now it’s up to us parents to escort the kids to front doors of the neighbors we know, in a sort of bizarro-world trick or treat. Only this is more expensive, and the candy’s not as good.

The kids predictably lose interest by the time SpongeBob comes on, so it is incumbent upon the parents to harangue their friends, co-workers and relatives into making some kind of token purchase or the kids won’t “earn” their LED-light keychain or whatever. We parents all know how this works, and we play the game, buying stuff from each other at various times of the year when these sales schemes come around. Childless adults, however, seem to disappear when it comes time to place your order for that 18” tall chocolate Santa with a bag full of glitter candy canes.

Barb and I have become disgusted enough with the whole process that we decided we’ll just cut a check to the PTA so we won’t be saddled with this distasteful, materialistic obligation. But we forgot to tell Speaker of our decision, and she came home yesterday with the big Sales Packet, chattering excitedly about winning a pair of roller blades with a built-in mp3 player.

Whoops. Beaten to the punch. Well, I suppose I could always use another pear-shaped kitchen timer. And what’s not to like about caramel clusters?

But I’ll be damned if I’m going to register at http://www.gafundraising.com, using Lewis and Clark’s PIN # 1043603 so I will receive a personal registration number, enabling me to shop online. No way. And if you think I’m going to enter Speaker Wire’s name in the appropriate boxes, and continue to shop, you’d better think again. Even if I can securely use my Visa or MasterCard to buy gifts or magazine subscriptions, I’m not going to take advantage of their easy checkout process.

Oh, by the way, here’s an announcement. Each copy of my next CD will come giftwrapped.

[Need a break from watching our economy circle the drain? Bookmark NewWest.net/BobWire, or better yet, subscribe to the RSS feed on the Community Blogs page. Now git!]

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