Have you dropped a few bucks in the till yet?.

Tuesday, December 21, 1999

Have you dropped a few bucks in the till yet?

The Salvation Army Austin Corps reports it has collected about 65 percent of its goal for this season. There could be several reasons the kettles aren’t bringing in as much this year. One possibility raised is that the recent spat of warm weather has allowed shoppers to hit the stores earlier this year. Perhaps those early shoppers weren’t quite in the Christmas mood yet.

Hopefully, the shoppers passing by the kettles will drop in a few bucks in the next few days as they scramble to complete their holiday shopping. Perhaps they will feel more of the Christmas spirit this week.

That’s what one anonymous person did last year. As the corps was about to wrap up its campaign last Christmas, one person gave the Salvation Army a check for $10,000. What a Christmas gift!

Perhaps the Salvation Army needs to look at other ways to raise funds in the future. Many of us apparently are buying holiday gifts online this year. E-commerce only will increase. Perhaps some of the major e-commerce Web sites offering holiday gifts could ask online browsers if they’d like to contribute money to their local Salvation Army unit and be billed not only for their holiday gifts, but the donation, too. Of course, there would be logistical problems in seeing that the local units receive the dollars from a major Web vendor, but that’s not to say that it couldn’t work.

While the local corps fund-raising is below its target for this season, that won’t affect any of the corps’ projects or assistance, local corps personnel say. And that’s a good thing, especially with all the good that the Salvation Army does in our community.