Thanks ladies. I think we are going to try the DONATION JAR thing. Like one girl said, they arent free, they are for a donation. I will stand at that table all night if need be! LOL I will let you know how it goes [img]smile.gif[/img] thanks again, always nice to hear others opinions.
I've experienced both. I prefer donations. Normally you have more people who will give you $1.00 for something you were charging $0.75 for or $5 instead of $3. Shoot, sometimes people will drop a buck and take nothing! (Those alone makes up for those who pay $1 for something more expensive) I agree it needs to be staffed and as for kids taking stuff, let them know its not free, it comes with a donation. When thinking about perceived value, more people are fair than dishonest. And you will get a lot of generocity. Plus it eliminates the time spent on pricing everything.
I think I would recommend pricing too. Just because of the inconsistency in the perceived value of items as mentioned above. When we do our bake sale, we run everything at half price the last 30 minutes.
We don't do PTO bake sales, but we've used the donation approach at our ice cream social and at church for various events. It's been our experience that the donation bucket brings in more money. However, if the table is unstaffed, or wide open (i.e. no line) and people can come up as they please, you might find lots of things walking away without paying. The times we've used the bucket is when people are filing through a line and they are confronted with the bucket at the beginning and end of the line. A whole meal, or an ice cream sundae for each member of your family has a perceived value that's fairly consistent. A plate of 12 cookies might be worth $5 to one person and only $1 to the next. There's a lot of variability in the items in a bake sale.
I'm interested in what others will recommend to you, because I think I've come down on the side of item-pricing for a bake sale.
We are doing a BAKE SALE this Friday evening, in conjunction with our Family Dinner and Clothes by the Pound Drop Off.
In the PTO Today Bake Sale packet they suggest putting out a DONATION JAR in stead of pricing each item. What do you all think? I asked my board and half say price and half say jar. Pros and cons to both...biggest pros...we dont have to make change, some think people are more likely to just throw in dollars...biggest cons...kids taking too much off the table without paying, parents sending the kids up because there are no prices. Any help would be appreciated!
