Cakes too cheap at school fair?

[Clary]

It was our school fair this afternoon; I went to help as requested on refreshments, carrying cakes I had made (big chocolate cupcakes topped with chocolate buttercream).

Got there only to see a notice advertising cakes on sale at 20p. Surely that's ridiculous? It wouldn't have covered the cost of the ingredients in the cakes I made. Now I know people donate the cakes, but surely no-one objects to paying 50p a cake at a school fair, do they, even if it's just for a glace-iced bun?

The cost of ingredients has risen hugely in the last couple of years (a dozen eggs is £3 up from £2 a year or two ago, the butter I use is now £1.40 where it was 90p two years ago, etc) and don't PTAs need to bear that in mind? Or AIBU?

(BTW I am on the PTA and will be putting some of this to the chair).

I would quite happily divide the profit of a summer fair per child at the school and save the PTA a lot of the petty begrudging by asking each parent to donate money instead - how would that work for community events and social interaction? If you normally make £500 and have about 100 children at the school, then you can save all that hassle for £5 per child

completely agree, which is why I have always said if the main purpose is to raise money. If there are other factors to take into account then they affect whether stuff should be sold at a loss (which in fact wouldn't be a loss in this case).

But in the case of raising funds to pay for treatment for a dying child, would you want cakes that took someone £10 to bake and sell them for £5, or would you rather just have the £10?

I do despair a bit at some ladies' grasp of numbers stuff.....

So, with all best intentions can I offer up a basic maths/economics lesson for ladies involved with either baking for fundraising cake sales/ pricing or selling/ buying the end product ?That pretty much means all of you so listen up !

Say I bake and decorate 10 fairy cakes (trust me I wouldn't - I'm crap at baking, my job is to buy plenty of them and in particular the less spectacular looking ones on the stall ). Say this cost me 2.50 for ingredients and let's guestimate that 30 pence worth of gas/electricity was used.

That's £2.80 divided by 10 = 28p per cake.

I have donated £2.80 (plus my own time - time is money to lots of people like self-employed types but forget about that for this example).

The PTA appointed pricing lady decides my fairy cakes are classed as small and small cakes are to be 20p each so they can be afforded by children maybe.

That's 10 cakes @20p each = £2.00 in total cash in the cake stall cash pot.

The PTA fundraising ladies have taken my £2.80 donation an converted it into £2.00. They have not, repeat not, created £2.00 out of £0.00 as per someone's calculations earlier.

Let's move on to the purchaser who has kindly deigned to attend the fundraising cake sale and intends to buy some cakes. She's first to the stall and spies my lovely (ha ha, in my dreams!) fairycakes and decides to buy the whole lot, pays £2.00 and leaves feeling that she's done her bit by buying some cake sale goods.

She's contributed to school funds hasn't she ? Well, sort of, but she didn't just hand over £2.00 with nothing in return except the nice feeling of having donated something to school funds, did she ? She got 10 hand made decorated iced fairy cakes for £2.00. That's just shopping, not donating.

So, although without customers like her there would be no selling going on, if this was the case then in future the generous donating bakers could just hand over their ingredient's costs and save their time. The PTA would be better off as they wouldn't then be decreasing the value of that donation by underpricing. Money raised £2.80 !

If you attend and buy at cake sales and think things are priced too low then for gods sake offer more than the price, decline any small change, round up, add a donation, whatever.

If you bake for these sales and fear that your donation will be reduced by poor pricing then get yourself and icing pen and "ice the price" as part of the decorating process !

PTA people, take heed of the possibility of reducing the value of a bakers' actual donation and if the school children are being encourage to bring in money to buy a cake at breaktime send out details in advance of the anticipated minimum price of a cake/biscuit to prevent parents sending 20p, thinking "that'll cover it, there's always small cakes priced at 20p".

Perhaps O'level maths or economics should cover cake sales as a specific topic.

RT replace "ladies" with "people" in your first line and I agree. This is all about conversion.

However, if you factor in other issues (sense of community, self worth, fun day out) then it may be sensible to sell at a loss. If the aim is pure profit then it's never sensible to sell at a loss.

Actually that's not true. With half an hour to go at the end of the day, selling at a loss makes more sense than giving he stuff away or throwing it out.

Yeah, YABU, really. It's not such a big deal. We made lovely chocolate cupcakes with fudge icing for daughter's cake-day (er, that's what she called it), which might have got more than 20p to sell, but some people bought in supermarket ones that they'd dabbed some icing with about a tonne of food colouring in and had been blatantly poked by toddlers before arrival. They can't go round pricing them all individually, so 20p is an average for all of them. I wouldn't pay 50p for a toddler-poked tesco cake with dayglo red icing.

Rotten timing, you are right, but its a shame you had to frame it in such a fucking patronizing post.

RottenTiming - what you have forgotten to factor in is that there are a lot of people out there who would spend £2.80 on baking cakes to donate who would not just give the money instead - not sure whether they like to show off their skills, or whether they don't want their children to be left out when it's a case of making a visible donation, but it's true. Believe me, I have spent most of the last 18 years either helping/running PTA events or working in a junior school office and the resistance to just giving money is very strong....

RT, you might Wang to rethink your post, GCSE's now, not O Level as in my day. And we are a bunch of Vipers.

Stealth we scrapped cake stall this summer after being stuck with loads of cakes we couldn't get rid of at Christmas fair, despite trying to flog for 10p a plate.

ooh next time send them to me I will eat them if for a good cause

I'd have eaten them if I'd realised they were calorie free at the time !

well of course they are. Any food you buy where the profits go to charity is calorie free.
Cadbury's is a charity, right?

In my dreams

wow, we had our cake stall yesterday, large cupcakes and large muffins were 50p each, small ones 25p each
packets of brownies, flapjacks, biscuits etc £1.50
plates of buns/smaller offerings (6 to a plate) £1.50

larger cakes started at £3.00 going up to £7 for an amazing huge fresh strawberry french tart/flan thing.

we sold out about half way through the fete.

That said there was nothing at the fete available for 10p, the hook a duck etc were 20p a go and the bouncy slide was 50p for 3 goes.

Never really occured to me but I guess that even the least well off in our village are able to afford £5 worth of stuff at the fete. That does make us lucky as a school.

YANBU op but at least people paid for the cakes even if they were underpriced.

We recently had a cake sale at work to raise money for a charity, one hard necked colleague helped herself to lots of stuff and then said she wasn't actually paying for any of it because she too had donated some cakes!!! Not sure how a cake swap would raise money for the needy!

I know Stealth, that exactly how the poor woman selling the cakes responded

Patronising - my arse.

People on here need to take themselves less seriously and recognise a tongue in cheek send up method of delivering information.

By the way, my dear, there's no need to be so coarse by resorting to bad language !

Mumsnet ain't what it used to be

Chunkjojo that's outrageous, I'd have smacked her hands away from the cakes like a naughty child with designs on wolfing stuff intended for sharing.

Rusty, I realise that many people like baking/are good at it/just do an extra batch or two to add to their normal home baking routine.

It is, as you say, completely different to asking for money but because it is more acceptable for a fundraising committee to ask for cakes instead of cash I do feel it is their responsibility then to value the contribution accordingly (I don't mean valuing literally here) and not just say it is a donation therefore cost to us £0.00 anything we sell it for is a profit. If they want continued goodwill of any sort tangible (cakes) /intangible (time) they need to place a suitable value on it.

It's fine to flog off the "surplus stock" more cheaply at the close of play, shops do it to minimise waste and maximise revenue/profit. Once it is past its sell by date it is worthless.

The problem with starting high and planning to drop the price at the end is
(a) after the first sale you do this people will expect it and hold off buying until the prices drop
(b) if it rains before the end of the sale, people will go home and leave you with unsold cakes
(c) the cake stall usually sells out fast if cakes are reasonably priced and if you are short on volunteers, which we usually are at our school, you can redeploy the sellers elsewhere (or alternatively tempt a reluctant volunteer with a cake stall slot, because they know they will be let off early)

no I'm not suggesting that as a strategy, just saying having leftovers near the end is the only excuse, from a financial pov, for selling at a loss

So glad we do ours by donation. I would think 20p reasonable for a small fairy cake or bun. Wouldn't buy the big cupcakes with lots of buttercream, these seem to be conspicuous by their absence at our school, so I guess many others feel the same (fiddly to transport as well) mostly it's traybakes and fairy cakes. I don't add up the cost of anything I make for school, that misses the point completely for me.

This is why, when I was at school, my class decided by Y8 to stop bothering with making cakes and just bring in the cash instead. Less effort, no missing break to sell stuff and more money for the charity.

Should add that our policy doesn't appear to have deterred any of our cake bakers, or if it has there are plenty that are happy with the system as we always have masses of cakes for our monthly cake sale, the children have a great time and the queue moves quickly because there's no adding up or change to worry about, people just put their donation in a tin before they walk away.