Alex Rast wrote:

>
> What I wonder about is, why do so many companies and institutions fall into
> going to obsessive lengths in order to avoid being sued? It's obvious that
> some of the measures they recommend are clearly absurd, like the above
> situation, but to me it seems that the deeper absurdity is people worried
> about being sued at all. Yes, we have a litigous society, and yes, if some
> accident, no matter how trivial, occurs, somebody will sue, but if they do,
> so what? You're being sued. Big Deal!

Being sued can be a big deal. It can put companies out of business. Some
countries are worse than others when it comes to law suits. Look what happened
in the US when a woman burned her crotch. Sure, the coffee was what, but what
kind of an idiot holds a cup of hot coffee with her thighs? Canada is not much
better. I recently cited the case of a small company that had to pay an
employee because she got drunk after leaving a company party, and another case
where two kids on dirt bikes sued the city that owned the land that they were
trespassing on when they crashed into each other.

> >... I used to bake
> >stuff for the bake sale at my son's school. Then I found out that the
> >were selling the stuff for less than it cost me to make them. Nuts to
> >that. All I was doing was providing someone with cheap baked goods and
> >the school was getting the money.
>
> Isn't that the idea? You give freely of your time and resources so that
> someone else may benefit. A bake sale isn't being run for your profit.

Well if it is not being run for profit I guess they do not need my
contribution. It was my understanding that the bake sale was a fundraiser. I
guess that since the Home and School Association was not investing anything in
the venture it is not a matter of profit and loss, but the whole idea was to
raise money for the association. It wasn't some sort of food bank where I
suppose I could have skipped the part where I bought all the ingredients and
spent the time to bake the cookies. I could have just gone to the sale and paid
bargain basement prices for baked goods that had cost other people money to
make.

> What
> the school does is price things according to a reasonable margin they might
> wish to make, so that every dollar somebody spends on the baked goods goes
> into their coffers. You provide the baked goods for free, which means they
> don't have to pay the overhead involved with materials, labour, and
> facilities, that would otherwise cut into the amount of direct money they
> made off the bake sale. And they stand to make more than they would if they
> priced it at some margin above the cost to produce the items, because more
> people will be attracted by the opportunity to buy quality baked items at
> cheap prices. Thus the school achieves its goal and raises maximum funds.

They could have considered the value of the goods and priced them accordingly.
IMO it was silly for me to spend $10 on ingredients for goods they sold for $5.
I could have just given them the $5 and I would have been ahead $5. The only
losers would be the cheap *******s who would have had to spend the extra $5 to
get back the amount I spent, or the $15-20 it would have cost them in a bake
shop for the same thing.

> I don't know about you, but I *like* the fact that my baked fare is being
> sold for less than it cost to make them. It warms my heart to know somebody
> out there is going to be able to get and enjoy high-quality baking for less
> money than they could do it themselves for, much less buy it at some
> bakery. In some cases, I'm sure, this means the difference between somebody
> being able to enjoy an item and not being able to afford it at all. How can
> I complain?

I guess you and I feel differently. I was felt insulted that our goods were
considered so cheap. I figured that if they were going to be so ungrateful for
my efforts I need not bother in the future.