Things I Learned at the Bake Sale

We -- meaning Dawn, Leslie and I -- actually debriefed for a bit after the main part of the bake sale on Saturday. What we decided is below, and I added some of my own.

1. Start out early on a hot day. I think we picked the right day (Saturday), but we could've started out earlier. As it got warmer, the sales dried up.

2. Have morning baked goods for sale in the morning. The muffins did much better the earlier it was. Cookies and cakes did better later.

3. If you're going to sell cake, don't slice it up. Sell the whole thing for a good price.

4. Don't wrap cookies in saran wrap, as people can't see them. What we found worked better was to have individual cookies unwrapped so people could see them. If they wanted to buy them, we had prepackaged bags of 3 each. Oh -- and don't have those naked cookies in front so people can touch them. Because they will.

5. Best selling cookies: peanut butter and chocolate chip.

6. It was a good thing to have utensils so that you didn't have to touch the items -- plastic gloves, tongs, paper bags.

7. Price everything in dollar increments. Nothing was for 25 cents. Group things together to reach the dollar price.

8. When you group things together, group like things. I originally thought a package of one molasses spice cookie, one sugar cookie and one peanut butter cookie was going to be popular. Most people wanted all of one thing.

9. Feature variety: poppyseed cake, cookies, cake, brownies, cupcakes. Also, adding other things for sale that you can buy cheap and sell high was a good idea (in our case, water and flowers).

10. A smile went a long way. So did, "Good morning."

One additional thing in regards to the voter registration process. Ken sent us an email at the end saying that 20 people had registered to vote. 20??! I only got one! I think in retrospect I should have shadowed Ken, because I suspect he is very good. And I suspect that an approach of coming up to one person, making eye contact, and asking if they're registered to vote (rather than my approach of just yelling it out) invites discussion and, if they say no, an offer. I still don't think the ballpark was a great place for this activity, especially on a day when the first 10,000 in the park get jerseys, but, hey, we still got 20, so *someone was doing the right thing!