Our elementary school started Market Day about 6 years ago. Every year the profits got better and better. Last year our profits were $5,200. We're a semi-rural school with 300 students. To make it work we needed about 6-8 volunteers. The group changes a little bit every year but always a fun, though hard working couple of hours. We made the pick up 3:30 - 4:30 and get a little flak from two income families but it works for the majority and is very convenient for the volunteers. The truck comes at 2:30 and the volunteers have most of the orders picked, packed and double checked by 3:45.
Some people pick up for their neighbors. The profit varies by your sales. If you get over hmmm, think it's $3,800 you get 15%, under that and you get 10%. We only had one 10% sale last year and this year they got 20% for the Oct sale for going over $5,000! I like the food and generally spend about $70 or more dollars. Just about everything is very good quality, especially the frozen vegetables and meat.
One thing that suprised me was the growing number of "alumni". We have about a dozen or more people (including me!) that no longer have children in the building but still order. There's even a group of women that collect orders at their office (A friend of theirs is a teacher at our school) and they pick up a few hundred dollars worth of orders every month. Just over half of the customers order on-line and the paper orders are entered by the chairpeople. Once it's started, this is a great fundraiser.
Market Day, monthly we average $400 and have nearly 400 students. Get order forms out timely, encourage people to order on-line. That's pretty much it. We advertise it in our newsletter and put up a poster or two near the main foyer. It's a lot of work though.
