Uncharitable Thoughts - Riffing on Raffling

Whipping through the express checkout (milk, bread, toilet paper, Maggie Beer Duck and Sherry Pate) the other day and dammit , I was caught again.

“That’s $219…. And would you like raffle tickets with that?”

So now they’re supersizing my grocery bill too, are they? Two-for-one offers on Delsey thousand-sheet recycled aren’t enough for them? The checkout guy smiled weakly.

Raffles!

The prizes are things you probably don’t really need, and the chance of winning (or even remembering when the draw is) is really small. What’s the value of the hamper? Or the car? How many tickets are they selling? It’s like having a tin rattled in your face while you’re trying to do a problem in elementary calculus.

There are ethical calculations to be worked through, too. What proportion of your decision to punt on a ticket is your wish to benefit the good cause you’ve just heard about, and how much is, let’s face it, greed?

If you wouldn’t stump up that $2 without getting a ticket, there must, at the margin, be some element of greed in it. You’re only entitled to the net amount of warm inner glow, not the gross.

From the point of view of the good cause concerned, your mixed feelings don’t really matter. They’ve collected a hamper of donated items, they’ve scattered books of tickets around like grass seed, and enough people, it’s hoped, will get the odds wrong and think, “A dollar for that whole hamper, not bad – not absolutely certain, no, but I’ll have a piece of that…” It’s money the good cause wouldn’t have had otherwise.

It’s irritating, though, that Australians do ask their good causes to go through this silly social ritual before they’ll unlimber their wallets.

Money is treated as if it’s so rude, in all senses of the word, that it can’t simply be asked for face to face. To make it socially acceptable we have to launder it through a dummy transaction for a purely hypothetical return. We’re pretending that a donation is in fact a payment.

Why can’t we just come clean and say what we mean? I’ve always liked a passage from one of Elizabeth McCracken’s novels:

People think that money is the hardest thing to ask for, but take my word for it: it's the easiest. 'Cause people can tell you no and there's no hard feelings, or they give it to you and it's yours to spend.

Words to live by, if you’re a fundraiser.

But all that seemed rather a lot to discuss when there were people stacked up behind me at the checkout.

So I bought a ticket. Fingers crossed.