Monday, February 23, 2009

The Tragedy of Bake Sales

Monday, February 23, 2009
Above: China Care members, Lily and Stephanie at the bake sale

NYU China Care had its first bake sale of the Spring 2009 semester today! We raise money to help fund life-saving surgeries for disabled Chinese orphans.

Total funds raised today? $98.05.

I'm wondering if there is a way to make bake sales more profitable, because I'm tired of having 5-6 volunteers help with baking hundreds of baked goods, transporting all of those goods to the sale site, sitting for hours, trying to get passersby to buy cookies and brownies, and coming out with small profits. The work that we put in is worth more than the money we come out with! We could all just volunteer our hypothetical wages (in the case that we could actually be working and being paid our average work wages, instead of volunteering our time; thus the theory of opportunity cost) for the time we put in and raise much more. But, we want to keep up the community involvement by educating our peers about China Care.

It seems like there has to be a better model for bake sales. Does anyone out there have suggestions on how to ramp up our profits?

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