With a huge number of trees to be sold, we pulled out all the stops and declared All Hands on Deck! Thanks to all the Club members, family members and Rotary Supporters who turned up to help on the first day and many days thereafter we managed to sell 409 trees under quite difficult circumstances, as it played out.
Rain on the first selling day limited the sales, as it’s not so nice to take the kiddies to select a tree from under an umbrella. Nevertheless we did sell a record number that day, despite the wet conditions.
The second day dawned fine and calm, and found us back in the Mingara carpark with a steady stream of customers. Until suddenly there weren’t. Those of us there could not fathom the drop off, until we realised that the Mingara Christmas Fair which opened at 10am, had traffic at a gridlock for a good kilometre in each direction, and no-one in their right mind would be pushing through the standstill to carry away a tree! Regardless, we managed to sell 278 the first weekend—although had to return some to the Gosford depot unsold. And then some of our members helped saw the bottoms off the leftover trees so they could be held over.
Feeling fresh on the following weekend, we certainly started off well on the Saturday —until it got hot! Really hot! 38 degrees hot! We stuck it out until after 1pm, selling the odd one here and there. Certainly not ideal.
The Sunday was kinder, and we managed to sell another 131 trees for the weekend. Not the overall total of 500 we had hoped—but not due to lack of effort!
Our base price for trees was $120, but we averaged nearly $135 using Clive’s Ribbon System—where silver, gold and purple ribbons were tied to the top of the better trees, and these were sold for $135, $150 and $175 respectively. We did have three totally stand-out trees—so we tied some red and white tape around these, which sold between $180 and $200.
We had great respect for those clubs who offered to sell leftover trees on the third weekend.
Well done everyone! The result for Grandparents Raising Grandchildren from our club alone is $6009—and from all the clubs on the Coast it is almost $25,000.
