The World's Most Competitive Bake Sale
A free B2-level English story for language learners, readable online in English, with an option to listen via the free Storyteller app.
A hallway scheduling clash between chess club and robotics team escalates into a full rivalry of competing bake sale displays.
Tabitha's chess club and Yuki's robotics team had both scheduled their fundraising bake sales for the same Friday, at opposite ends of the same hallway. Neither club was willing to reschedule.
"We were here first," Tabitha insisted, though nobody could actually confirm which sign-up sheet had been submitted earlier.
"By four minutes, maybe," Yuki said. "That's not exactly a strong claim to the entire hallway."
What began as a scheduling disagreement escalated, over the course of one lunch period, into something neither club had planned for. Tabitha's table offered cookies. Yuki's table, in response, offered cookies that were, according to a hastily written sign, "twice the size, for the same price."
Tabitha's team retaliated by lowering prices. Yuki's team added free samples. By the time the sale started after school, both tables had assembled elaborate displays, with handwritten signs comparing calories, prices, and moral character.
"Robotics Club members," read one sign, "have never once dropped a project deadline." A cookie was taped beneath it, as if offering supporting evidence.
Tabitha responded with a poster reading, "Chess Club has produced three regional champions and zero lawsuits." It was a claim Yuki privately admitted was both true and completely irrelevant.
Students, sensing free entertainment, gathered between the two tables rather than actually buying anything from either one. That meant that by four o'clock, both clubs had sold almost nothing and made almost no money at all.
Their advisor arrived to check on the sale. She found two increasingly elaborate displays, a crowd filming the whole thing on their phones, and not a single dollar in either donation jar.
"This was supposed to raise money," she said, "not start a cold war."
Tabitha and Yuki looked at each other, both a little embarrassed, and both, privately, slightly impressed by how far the rivalry had escalated.
"Truce?" Yuki offered. "Combined table. We split everything fifty-fifty."
"Only if the sign says both clubs," Tabitha said. "Equal font size. I've seen how you do things."
By the end of the hour, the merged table had outsold both original setups combined. The audience they had already gathered finally had something to actually purchase.
