WHO THE HELL WAS BUYING ALL THOSE CHOCOLATE BARS?

Katie Hensch
Jul 27, 2017 · 2 min read

I can’t remember when exactly it would happen, but I do remember that it happened every year. A grammar school teacher would place a hefty box World’s Finest Chocolate Bars on my desk that we were to sell to fundraise. I’d lug the box home, my Dad would take it into work the next morning, and we’d usually sell the whole box after a month (or whatever the allotted timeframe was) of his coworkers purchasing them from his cubicle.

Reminiscing on this got me thinking about the few people in my class who would sell case upon case of chocolate bars. What the hell was going on there?

The bars, as far as my poor memory on this and the very little research I’ve done tells me, were and are $1 each. Basic math tells you that the whole case would then be $60. Who, even with exorbitant disposable income, was buying $60 worth of average-at-best tasting chocolate?

Even if they could frivolously spend like that, what would they do with (give or take) five pounds of it in their possession? At best, that person’s gonna eat one of each flavor before their desire to touch a single waxy rectangle of “chocolate” is lightyears away. W.F. Crisp and Caramel bars must have looked back at them from the deep recesses of their pantry for months on end. Imagine the dread of knowing that your niece or nephew would be coming back to rob you of your money soon, their empire of shitty candy-selling growing with each Andrew Jackson you handed them.

Were the people buying this chocolate deeply misinformed from their pint-sized dealer that this was, indisputably, the world’s best chocolate? This must’ve been a bargain if we’re coming from this standpoint. “HA! Godiva who?!,” the moron, who just spend $60 on a candy that I’m sure Gordon Ramsay (or anyone with tastebuds, truly) would deem inedible, must’ve said.

The kids who sold a bunch of cases seemed to know something I didn’t. I was at the mercy of the sales briefing from my Dad each night at dinner, blind to the transactions taking place within the workplace. I wish, like I did then, that I had the power to pump those cases out of those classrooms like they were the blue meth in Breaking Bad. Were the people buying them fiends for fundraising or for terrible confections? Perhaps, hauntingly so, they were both. A yin and yang of good deeds and an inexplicably strong desire for World’s Finest Chocolate.

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