Not entirely sure if there is a time of year where fund raising attempts are higher than other times of the year, but based upon my experience on Saturday I am on guard when going to the supermarket. Granted, the Salvation Army people are always prevalent during the Christmas holiday, but who feels bad about not giving money to those people? On top of that, is there even a chance that any percentage of the donations made to what they would want you to believe is the Salvation Army actually go to fund a charitable cause? And I don’t really feel all that bad for them because they have a terrible approach to trying to pilfer money from people. They ring bells giving everyone advanced notice that they are trying to get you to donate money.

What does this do? Well for me, it does a couple of things. First of all, it allows me to find an alternate entrance to the store where there isn’t someone asking for money. Secondly, if they have every entrance covered I pick the bell ringer who most closely resembles a homeless person (because I never give money to homeless people, it’s like feeding seagulls at the beech, once you give them money they won’t leave you alone) and just walk right by them as if they weren’t even there.

Unfortunately for me, the Girl Scouts are much brighter in their approach to peddling their terrible cookies. I was running into the D&W on Knapp’s Corner for a Starbucks Coldbrew and thought to myself “it looks like there maybe someone in there trying to sell something, you really need to proceed with caution.” I’d been burned quite a few times by those people who give you a free Grand Rapids Press expecting that it will get you to immediately subscribe. Have you heard of the internet? Yeah give me a hard copy of the Grand Rapids Press and while your at it could you get me a copy of the Yellow Pages? Granted  my online newspapers do me no good when I want to start a bon fire at my house, but I’ve found gasoline is a perfectly acceptable substitute for newspaper when it comes to starting fires, and much more exciting.

Did I proceed with caution as my inner voice had instructed me to do? Of course not, and I was caught entirely off guard by a group of over privileged school girls and their over privileged moms. Not off guard enough to fork over 4 bucks for a box of cookies that contained maybe 12 cookies tops, but I still don’t like having to say no to people if I have an alternative. (It’s why I frequently tell my kids to ask their mom instead of just telling them no when they demand  gum at 8:30 in the morning) For goodness sakes at least throw a minority into the cookie selling mix. If you have a minority in there I have to believe your going to better your sales by at least 25%, granted I’m pretty sure the Forest Hills Girl Scouts would have no idea where to locate a minority to boost the sales of their cookies. Sorry, but I’m not buying cookies from a group of girls who all have better i phones than I have. Can’t you just have your rich parents buy a thousand boxes and leave me the hell alone?

The truly terrible part about this is that there was an alternative girl scoutless entrance/exit available, but I only was able to determine that, and exit that way, after I was ambushed entering the store.   In my mind supermarkets should be under some type of obligation to alert their patrons that there are solicitors present, and that customers need to be on guard when entering the store.  While this is somewhat of a solution to the problem it only works  for stores that have multiple entrances, where it doesn’t work is at the Ace hardware in Cascade.  There is only one way in and out of the store so making contact with would be solicitors is unavoidable.  Last summer some kids and a couple of adults were selling “gourmet” popcorn. It wasn’t entirely clear who they were affiliated with, and they may very well have been just some dudes who recruited random kids to sell over priced popcorn.

They got me, and it was one of those rare times in my life where I was incapable of being an asshole.  Furthermore, I made the cardinal sin that I’m pretty sure no Dutch person worth their salt would ever acknowledge or actually do, I failed to ask the price of the popcorn prior to saying “I’ll take two bags.”  In my defense it was chocolate drizzled popcorn, you put chocolate drizzle on anything and it sells, husbands out there who have wives who love chocolate but are not particularly fond of something else, well, I think this would be a good way to test the power of chocolate.  “You put chocolate where?  Have fun getting that off without my help.”

It ended up being something like $8 a bag and the bags were the size of the bags of chips you get with a subway combo meal.  The only thing worse than having one put over on you by a bunch of 12 year olds is being yelled at by the student life guards at the community pool.  “Sir, your kid can’t be in the deep end of the pool, it’s pretty obvious by the way he’s clinging to you he has no idea how to swim.”  “I’m really sorry, it won’t happen again, just don’t kick me out of here, this pool is the only thing that keeps me sane, don’t take it away, please don’t!”

While I’d like to think that the Girl Scouts and the popcorn selling kids are selling their products for worthy causes, I don’t.  What is the point of the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts?  Isn’t there an app you can put on your kids phone that takes the place of these organizations?  Do my kids really need be part of an organization that focuses primarily on knot tying and wears all brown?  I can over look the preoccupation with knot tying, but not the head to toe brown.  “If our kids could resemble giant turds I feel like that’s going to get the parents 100% behind our organization, well that and some gay scoutmasters.”

I was never in  the boy scouts, I was in something entirely worse, cadets, it’s boyscouts for kids who have the unfortunate luck of being born into the Christian Reformed church.  Not only did we learn about knot tying, we also had to learn about God and how to be better knot tyers (i’m not sure tyers is a word, but spell check isn’t giving me any suggestions for it) for Jesus Christ.  At the end of every cadet meeting we had to all stand in a circle holding hands with the lights off and sing “Living for Jesus”. (I still know all the words to Living for Jesus)  I learned early on you wanted to be between two kids and not two counselors, kids hands are much less sweaty than adults.  No way the Boy Scouts could have ever gotten away with doing something like we did to conclude our meetings, not with the rampant amount of homophobia running through that organization.   Well, at least we never had to sell cookies.