The Yellow Power Ranger Once Asked Me to Round Up For Charity
...and it didn't go well for either of us
For the past year, I’ve been trying (longingly, fleetingly, unsuccessfully) to write an article about checkout charity for a fundraising trade publication.
For those unfamiliar with the term, “checkout charity” happens when you’re cashing out at a store and are prompted to round up your sales total for a given nonprofit. It’s an interesting way to raise money; I don’t know a lot about it, so I took it up as a topic.
The question driving the project was: “Do the cashiers asking me to add a few cents to my total consider themselves fundraisers?” It’s a question about the people behind checkout charity, not about the money.
I came to this question the old-fashioned way: after a confrontation with the Yellow Power Ranger in the checkout line of a Spirit of Halloween pop-up store last October while shopping with Child #1 and Child #2.
In case you’re wondering, my children have always loved Halloween, which is how we wound up in a Spirit of Halloween store. The decorations, the costumes, the excitement, the candy, the whole shebang. We’re not winning any awards for our home’s exterior Halloween décor, you guys, but we show up for it.
E A R L Y (B U T N E C E S S A R Y) S I D E B A R
When my kids were little, I invented the “Halloween Fairy.” She takes your candy back to Candyland while you’re asleep. Sometimes, if you’re really good, she’ll leave you one last treat… but only if you’re sweet to your father.
I’d then dump all the candy in a grocery bag, haul it to campus, and unload it onto my English 101 students when handing back their essays. There’s something about getting a fun-size Snickers and a roll of Smarties that makes the medicine go down easier when you’re reading my comments on your C+ analysis of symbolism in Pride and Prejudice.
Both kids have always been the creative, homemade costume types:
Every year, me and these two delicious waffle faces make a trip to Spirit of Halloween to refresh our supplies. We’re mainly looky-loos taking it all in, but on this particular trip we bought something (I don’t remember what) for the house.
In the checkout line, the cashier—dressed as, you guessed it, the Yellow Power Ranger—rings us up and asks: “How much are you donating to [NAME] Children’s Hospital?”
I don’t know how you feel about (a) the Power Rangers or (b) the phrasing of that question, but I was totally put off by both. She wasn’t inviting me to round up or asking me to consider it. She was telling me to. Rounding up was an expectation, not a choice. It rankled me because that’s not how you ask people for money, is it? (I mean, Scout comes in hot, too, but at least she has a pitch). So I said “Nothing at all,” immediately felt like a tight-wad in front of my kids, and then left.
On the ride home—once all the tutting, tsk-tsking, pearl clutching, and huffing were out of my system—I wondered if the Yellow Power Ranger meant to frame the request that way: as an assumption rather than an invitation. After all, has she been taught how to make an ask? She’s not a fundraiser. Or… wait, is she? Does she consider herself a fundraiser? A volunteer? I don’t know. How does the Yellow Power Ranger feel about this? I should write an article about it!
Voila! Thus was born my research question at a Spirit of Halloween pop-up store: “Do the cashiers asking me to add a few cents to my total consider themselves fundraisers?”
Over the past year, whenever prompted to round up for charity, I’d ask cashiers if they consider themselves fundraisers. 9 times out of 10, the standard response I received was some variation of: “No. They make us ask if you want to round up.”
(1 in 10 did start interesting conversations with me when I asked. At a burger joint off the Pennsylvania Turnpike, my father-in-law and I were asked to round up our total. When I asked the cashier if she thought of herself as a fundraiser and she said “No. I’d say I’m more like an advocate.” Which is a pretty terrific answer, don’t you think?)
In general though, after sniffing around for a bit, I found the answer to my own question without needing to write an article about it: By and large, checkout cashiers don’t consider themselves fundraisers.
(And scandalously few Power Rangers have asked me for money since this encounter last year.)
Perhaps the question I was trying to answer wasn’t the right question at all. The reality is that any cashier who asks you to round up for charity is a fundraiser, whether they feel that way or not. And as such, they/we would do well to embrace it, acknowledge it, talk about it, and know that it takes more delicacy to do well than we tend to think it does—a point that has continued to bubble, bubble, bubble to the surface of this Substack over the past month:
Because when we’re asked to round up, a lot of people (like we saw with Nicholas Cage) want to say yes until it hurts.
The Yellow Power Ranger cashier shared some of the same directness as my teenage fundraising bully, Scout, but without any of the plucky conviction that, I think, endeared her to so many of you.
And like with Scout, there are better, more deliberate ways to slow down, make a connection (however brief), and ask people to give so they feel good about what you’re asking them to do.
Regrettably, I have no immediate solutions for you or the Yellow Power Ranger.
This October, the Halloween Fairy will still come by our place and take my kids’ candy back to Candyland.
And this October, I’ll still take them both to Spirit of Halloween.
But this time, instead of getting annoyed with any of the Mighty Mighty Power Rangers who want me to round up for charity, I’ll do something more devilish than walking away in a huff.
I’ll get her to subscribe to this Substack and see if she can pick up a thing or two. Boo!
Happy Halloween in July, you guys.
yellow power ranger was and always will be my favorite💕💕💕
One time I was behind on grading, so I came into Norman Mayer on a Sunday night and systematically chewed ALL the disgusting bubblegum delivered by the Halloween Fairy (you know, the stuff that's literally the bottom of the plastic pumpkin barrel, having rightly been passed over by everyone with taste). I can't say I remember the experience fondly, but the essays did get marked.