Tuesday, January 24, 2012

The Pen Is Mightier


Today our trusty UPS man delivered another 9,000 pens for our Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes.  If you follow this blog you know that buying items to fill thousands of gift-filled boxes for Operation Christmas Child involves year-round bargain hunting.

One of the staffers at my church, Grace Church, was kind enough to send me a message last week to let me know that officemax.com has the Office Max store brand of pens for only 20 cents for a pack of 12.  Unfortunately, I missed the 20% off on everything on the site sale by a couple of days.  I spent some time trying to find coupon codes that I could use to get the price down lower to no avail.

Still, this gets the per-pen price down below 2 cents each--not bad.  These pens are not the best quality and don't write as well as I wished they did.  I generally put two pens in each box, though, so I'm thinking I'll include one of these and one of higher quality.

Right now I've ordered a total of 18,000 of these and I have cartons stashed under every bed in my house.  I'm a little afraid of putting them in the storage container because of the freezing temperatures.

If you're interested in buying pens for your shoeboxes at a great discount, then head over to officemax.com and check them out.  Do a search for ballpoint pens and then click to sort them by price--lowest to highest--and they'll be the first that come up.  They come in black, blue, or a package that has a mix of red, blue and black.

You can get a little bit more of a discount (3%) by going to eBates first, joining there, and then proceeding with your order.  If you want to join eBates you can give credit to my account by clicking here.

I know these simple pens may not seem like much to you and me, but they can allow a child in another country to attend school and receive an education.  My friend Lejla, who received an Operation Christmas Child shoebox in Bosnia when she was a child, tells of 56 children in her class all sharing one pencil.

A simple pen can be a mightier gift than you can imagine.

1 comment:

  1. This is great! I just went and ordered some pens. Let's empty the OfficeMax warehouse and fill the OCC warehouses!

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