Holiday shopping is inherently bad for savings accounts. Sometimes it seems like you're blowing through your budget and basically getting nothing in return. Sometimes you're depleting your budget and actually getting nothing.
Remember last Black Friday when 30,000 people bought actual poop from Cards Against Humanity for $6 a pop? This year, the card game team wasn't looking to sell anything—They were more excited about the idea of buying some things for themselves.
They say:
This year we offered our customers the ultimate Black Friday experience - the ability to buy nothing from us for $5. We took our entire store offline, and put up a simple payment form where people could give us $5.There's a (long) illustrated list of how the team spent the cash on their blog.
11,248 people gave us $5, and 1,199 people gave us more than $5 by filling out the form more than once. One enthusiastic fan gave us $100. In the end, we made a windfall profit of $71,145.
Cards Against Humanity is known for our charitable fundraising - since 2012 we've raised nearly $4 million for organizations we love like Worldbuilders, the Sunlight Foundation, the EFF, DonorsChoose.org, the Wikimedia Foundation, and the Chicago Design Museum. We even started a $500,000 full-ride scholarship for women getting degrees in science.
There's been a lot of speculation about how we would spend the money from Black Friday, and we're happy to announce that this time, we kept it all.
