Cookie seller loves the grind
You’ve probably seen them around every year. Their bright yellow tops, their big red buckets of cookies and all their free samples.
The Cookie Time Christmas cookie sellers are working long days leading up to Christmas to make enough money to get them through school, university or to keep them from having to work the rest of the year.
The average seller last year made $12,718 before tax, with the top seller making $37,387 before tax.
Aucklander Lucy Sharp is hoping the money she earns will get her through her final year at Massey University by paying for rent, petrol, food and, of course, some Christmas presents.
‘‘I’m hoping to make as much as
I can to help support me over summer.’’
Buckets cost $20 each or three for $57, but Sharp could not say how much each seller gets per bucket.
But the 20-year-old psychology student is putting in long hours in order to make the most money she can. And it wasn’t just sitting at a stall outside The Warehouse all day every day for seven weeks.
During the work days you’ll see sellers wandering around businesses taking orders. They then return in December to deliver all the cookies. Then in the evenings and weekends, they will set up their stall outside a business.
‘‘My days tend to look like, 7am wake up, 8.30am to 9am at your first business. And then at 3pm or 4pm going to my quick selling location till 7pm or 7.30pm. Then heading home to do an end of day and counting all my stock.’’
In the time between when she gets home and when she goes to sleep she is still working. Emailing businesses, packing orders, counting stock and getting ready to start over again the next day.
But Sharp loved the hard work. ‘‘I have met so many awesome people already, both sellers and people in the public.’’
The seller’s campaign ends when they sell all of their stock, so they could be working all the way up until Christmas Eve. At the end of it they do all of their own taxes.
Sharp is among a number of other sellers throughout the country who had begun sharing their day to day selling lives on social media, particularly TikTok, showing the job wasn’t always as glamorous as it seems with sellers getting turned down by businesses, some days making no sales and dealing with the neverending wet weather.