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This article started with a conundrum. After a year of saving soda can tabs at my desk, I’d managed to fill a small cereal bowl to the brim. I transferred them to a Ziploc and stowed them in my desk to later give to Ronald McDonald House Charities (RMHC), for their Pop Tab Collection drive that’s been going on for at least 10 years. When talk of a jelly-bean-in-a-jar-counting-contest came up later that day, I busted out my baggie of tabs as an alternative to jelly beans and the flabbergasting began.

“Who in the wolrd colelcts Coke tabs!?” “What a weird thing to hold onto.” Immediately, I’m self conscious and scrambling to explain myself, and the RMHC drive, but the amazement continued. The primary argument was that a check for $.50, the approximate worth of my tabs, is probably preferable to the charity than my baggie of tabs. After all, some poor employee there would have to then haul my tabs and the tiny donations of others to the recycling center, have them weighed, then get a tiny check for the organization.

It took some convincing, but at the end of the day I was on board with the idea that yes, in fact, RMHC would rather have a tiny amount of money than a baggie of tabs worth $.50. The employee I argued about with this said he would donate $2 in exchange for me not sending that bag of tabs, nor sending any other tabs collected over the next year.

This raises questions though. Would I personally have sent $2? Probably not. Would others? Who knows. Quite honestly, I’m a cheapskate. I do give money and time to charities, but I think I prefer these programs where something I’m already doing or purchasing, or something that would require a fraction of my time, helps a cause.

The big question remains though: is this program worth the effort to RMHC? Presumably it’s easier for RMHC to handle cash donation, but are people really going to donate a pocket full of change, as opposed to tabs? Apparently not, since the eventual donation from said employee was $50, not $2.

I couldn’t find information on the official RMHC website of how much money this program brings in, but what about those other non-monetary donation programs? General Mill’s Box Tops for Education has earned America’s schools $250 million in 12 years, Yoplait’s Save Lids to Save Lives helped rais $1.5 million in 2008, and Campbell’s Labels for Education has raised $100 million in merchandise for America’s schools over 30 years. I’m supposing that all these programs/schools would prefer cash donations, but they must have an easier time requesting a piece of a product packaging, since it requires only a nominal amount of time and no additional money from the consumers.

In the end, I probably would not make a cash donation to any of these programs, but I would possibly hold onto the pink lids if I ate yogurt, or collect box tops and soup labels for a school if I had kids. Since I drink soda though, I’ll continue to pull off my tabs and place them in the cereal bowl while continuing to ponder this odd, yet personalbly preferable donation style.