"Hey, I realize you could just donate $40,000 to the Red Cross directly if you felt so inclined, but wouldn't it be better to spend another $360,000 for 400,000 Mardis Gras-themed hurricane bracelets, vowing to rebuild New Orleans? Yes, I realize they've been rebuilding New Orleans for some time. And that Mardis Gras was four months ago."
Trying to appear like a philanthropist yet explaining your mostly self profiting capitalistic yet hilariously outdated cause to a mass of cynics. Your seemingly honest bewilderment to the typical backlash. More jokes pouring in at your expense. Clutchfans entertained this morning.
There is no way in hell you get $400,000 for those and I suspect you only paid $4,000 for them as the going rate is less than 2 cents a piece.
Donating a small percentage to charity is cool if it's something people want or already buy. "For every bottle of Coke you buy, we'll send 'X amount of money' to the American Red Cross." Cool, I was going to buy some Coke anyway and now I can feel good that some of it is going to charity. Yeah, Coke is still keeping most of the money, but I was going to buy their product anyway. It's just that now some of that money is going to charity. What Felix is trying to do is sell something that nobody wants under the guise of it helping charity. Nobody wants those bracelets. Nobody's going to wear one. "Is that a Hurricane Katrina bracelet?" "Yeah, I bought it to help the victims in West, TX." If I really wanted to help the Red Cross (and I do and have), I'd rather give them $1 directly than give Felix $1 for a bracelet I don't want just so he can give them $0.10. Using a charity to move a product nobody was ever going to buy and only giving a fraction of the profit to the charity is low. It's just a way to try to sell something you couldn't sell otherwise. Yeah, non-profits don't donate all the money they receive. There are overhead costs. But even they don't come close to using only 10% of the money for it's intended cause. This just seems like a guy who bought a bunch of bracelets and doesn't know what to do with them. If it were truly for charity, he'd only take out how much he paid for the bracelets initially, whatever the costs are for getting the bracelets to the people who bought them, and maybe a little for his own time and effort. But that's not going to be anywhere close to $360K.
I am in a family business so I understand your reasoning for giving 1% to whoever helps sell plus 1% to tipjar and 10% to Red Cross. They are all generous (relatively speaking) as nobody knows your overhead costs or initial investment. I however have no ideas on selling Hurricane Katrina bracelets in mardi gras colors. Kind of a bad look really, celebration mixed with disaster. Good Luck
bet he paid even less than that, maybe $1k considering how old Katrina is and how irrelevant the bands are. good job on trying to profit on a old disaster lol