Yes, that’s me!
I didn’t announce this beforehand but I was at the Vivocity outlet of Ben & Jerry’s on Tuesday as a Scooper for Free Cone Day. It was an interesting first-time experience, but let’s just say that I never want to be a Scooper on Free Cone Day ever again.
I don’t want to whine or complain about anything. I made the best of it, and left when I felt there was nothing else for me to contribute.
For the first time, B&J offered 18 flavors on Free Cone Day, which is a big headache if you are new to scooping, and have no idea which of the 3 brown mounds of ice cream in front of you is Chocolate Fudge Brownie. There are no labels for staff to read.
Also, there is no “standard’ amount of ice cream for each cone. Some scoopers will give you a large dollop of ice cream, while others won’t. In the midst of frantic ice cream scooping, I was told to scoop more ice cream onto each cone. Later on, I watched in horror as an experienced scooper handed a cone with an overly-large scoop of ice cream to a lady… only to have the ice cream mound fall off. So… what amount is just right? It would be SO much easier to just hand out cups of ice cream.
When the other blogger and myself were ushered out so the rest of the crew could pick up the pace, I decided that I would help give out Children’s Charities Association of Singapore brochures to those standing in the queue… under the hot sun at 12 noon.
And lo and behold, I spotted people queuing while eating their ice cream. Get this: BEFORE they had even finished eating their first cone, they were queuing for the second! And in case you think it is only penny-pinching Singaporeans who would do that, I spotted a trio of angmohs standing in line with their ice cream cones!
Why people would queue under the hot sun (at 12 noon on a Tuesday) TWICE for free ice cream, I know not. Well, maybe because it is free.
And here are the stats for the event:
1) Over S$5000 raised for The Children’s Charities Association of Singapore
2) Nearly 50,000 scoops of ice cream given out (which means, on average, people paid 10 cents each for their ice cream)
You know what? It would be way more effective to just charge S$1 per ice cream. And S$50,000 would be raised for charity, ten times what was collected!
