Crayon Conundrum

I admit it.  I'm a crayon snob.  I've used other brands of crayons in my Operation Christmas Child boxes from time to time but I am still stuck on Crayolas.  They draw so much better, and if a child's only going to get one set of crayons I'd like them to be nice ones.

So here I am trying to decide the best way to buy and finance crayons for this year's boxes.  If I buy 24-packs and split them into 3 packs of 8 crayons each, we will need 7,333 boxes to get to our goal of packing 22,000 Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes.

The past few years God has blessed us by having those 24-packs of Crayolas go on sale at places where we can go to WalMart and price match larger quantities.

This year, like last year, Toys R Us has Crayola 24-packs on sale this week for 4/$1.00.  Perfect.

EXCEPT this year there is a limit of 8 boxes.

Not perfect.

There isn't an ad for this week's unadvertised special.  Last year that was the case also but a few WalMart stores matched the price anyway.  But this year's quantity limit changes things.

Last year Toys R Us also had the Crayola 24-packs on sale at 4/$1.00 near the end of July.  This was advertised in an ad with no limit and it was easy to price match them at WalMart and even Target.  But with the limits this week I'm expecting limits in any future sales, too.

I just checked a site called crayonking.com where they sell individual Crayola crayons in bulk but they're about 4 cents per crayon.  That's TWICE the price of the normal WalMart back-to-school price of 50 cents for a 24-pack.

What to do?

I'd like to encourage more people in our city to help in purchasing the crayons because at 50 cents a box at WalMart they're still a really great deal.  Where else can you bless the socks off three kids for 50 cents?

But that means getting the word out...and finding a place to collect them...and inventorying them...and waiting to see if they are nice crayons (aka Crayola--lol)...

More waiting....more praying....

Like I said....a conundrum.