Advanced Merit Badging

There’s an order form on the counter of our office kitchen. Damn it.

Office kitchen order forms are WAY more than they appear. What may seem like a simple way to procure basic luxury or recreational goods has an intense amount of responsibility and office cultural overtones affixed to its high-glossy formatting. Don’t think your boss doesn’t look at the order form to see who is contributing to the social welfare of their fellow worker. He knows that a happy office is a sharing office, and a sharing office buys the crap of the office’s kids’ fundraisers regardless of use or need.

Yes, for decades parents of enterprising young sales children have been bringing in their offspring’s order forms to take advantage of a cubicle kingdom full of suckers. However, the day’s take depends not on order form location, but rather the quality of the merchandise. Take Sally Foster, for example. It is from a combination of quality gift wrap, various home gifts, and gourmet edibles that make a Foster order form a success in the office. 8 months from Christmas? Who cares! Buying some wrapping paper off the break room counter top will 1) save you a trip to Hallmark, 2) make you feel good for planning ahead and 3) make you feel less guilty for purchasing a box of those caramel filled chocolate meltaways you just signed up for as “emergency desk food.”

School children often hawk the wares of the mega candy corporations as means to earn some green for a future class trip or other fundraising activity. However, an office kitchen is a difficult marketplace to move product. You see, when it comes to candy, the names of the game are selection and availability. First off, an order form for standard candy bars makes little sense – since if someone’s ready to drop a buck fifty on a candy bar for a good cause, there’s a damn good chance that they’re hungry…now. I can’t see myself placing an order for a candy bar, only to wait in fevered anticipation for its arrival 10-14 business days from now. God, what if it’s all melty? Secondly, if the candy is on the premises, it’s likely limited to one or two varieties. Guess what, charity – the vending machine gives me twenty varieties. Sure, my money may not be going to support a worthy cause, but I am going to dine on the Snickers bar of my choosing. Limitations to the system are no doubt the downfall here.

Of course, we’d be remised to discuss sympathy order forms without mentioning the perfect business model of the mighty…Girl Scouts. Now YAB has covered everything there is to cover back in this classic early 2005 post, but everything I wrote back then holds true today. Ultimately, the Gals in Green have it right. By signing up to their order form, you are agreeing to buy something of which there is no other supply chain. You’ll have cookies, you’ll be contributing to the welfare of a colleague’s family, and you’ll prove to everyone that you don’t hate children. Girl Scout Cookies are the product that sells themselves; and this is a good thing because there’s no way I’m buying anything from a creepy sales rep who spends his entire day pacing the linoleum of my office kitchen.

It’s pretty damn easy to be a Girl Scout.

Boy scouts need money, too, so they of course must compete in the market with a product line of their own. But if they were to roll out cookies, no matter how brave, clean, and reverant they may be, people would simply accuse them of being market copycats. So somewhere along the line, boy scouts adopted...popcorn.

Funny, the only popcorn ever in our office kitchen is burnt microwave popcorn.

Not exactly the best billboard for the product.