Friday, Aug. 06, 2010

Save Mart makes one final push for children's hospital

Employees serve root beer floats in friendly rivalry vs. Atwater store

A bit of ice cream, a little root beer, a lot of competitive teamwork and many generous Save Mart customers combined Saturday to help continue a dream started in 1949.

For the last few weeks, Save Mart has been having an "icon sale" to benefit the Children's Hospital Central California. On Saturday, a team of Los Banos Save Mart employees, in a final push to outdo the contribution totals from the Atwater Save Mart, served root beer floats to anyone who gave a donation to the 58-year-old Madera hospital.

"We have these icon sales periodically throughout the year; MDA shamrocks, cancer awareness -pink ribbon, that kinda thing," said Peter Finnerty, Los Banos Save Mart manager.

Anyone who donates receives a colorful printed paper "icon" on which they can write their name or the name of their company. That's then posted in the store.

The local grocery store has taken in an estimated $5,000 in donations in the icon drive.

"We like to post (the icons), but we sold so many of them that there was no way physically possible to post all those up," said Finnerty. "We could have literally papered the entire front of the store end to end with what we sold."

The benefactors are the children treated at Children's Hospital Central California. The hospital's Web site says that its mission is to "provide high quality, comprehensive health care services to children, regardless of their ability to pay."

Finnerty said he was enthused about this fundraiser.

"It's just for a really good cause," he said. "(Visiting the hospital) was an eye-opening experience -- just seeing what they do and knowing that they'll take any child no matter what financial situation they're in."

The one thing Finnerty said stood out was the premature infants in the neonatal intensive care unit.

"That was just like, wow. They just don't look real ... but they're little babies -- just so small, but they're alive ... and they keep them alive. The technology is incredible and it was really cool to see some of that."

One of the main ideas that Finnerty and his crew came up with was selling root beer floats for the campaign. On Saturday, Rosa Sughayar and Lynzee Smith asked customers as they left the store to enjoy a float in exchange for a donation to the hospital.

"We've been doing this for three weekends. Our shoppers are really supportive," said Sughayar. "Some of them just donate."

"Five dollars, $10, $20," interrupted Lynzee.

As if on cue, Noelia Cardoza slipped a bill into the donation box. Both girls smiled, their point having been made.

Individual Save Mart stores competed against each other to see which one could obtain the most donations. Los Banos Save Mart's main nemesis in the friendly but fierce competition was the Atwater store -- managed by Roy Torres. Finnerty spoke to Torres and compared notes. Finnerty later jokingly suggested that Torres may have been "sandbagging" him on the numbers by understating the totals that Atwater had sold during their conversations about the fundraiser.

Finnerty repeatedly credited his team with what he hopes will be the winning total in the "Helping Hands Helping Kids" campaign. He said he thinks that nearly all of his 87 employees did something to help the effort.

"We just got behind it. It's not unusual for this store, for this team," he said. "We're almost always number one, two or three in icon sales. It's a unique situation because we have a great community and this is a good store for volume."

At press time, Finnerty had not yet been given the final tally by Save Mart's corporate office, but he has his fingers crossed and believes that the Los Banos store will come out as the top seller.

"I'm not gonna get all crazy till I actually see it," he said.

Finnerty's crew, and those who donated, help to keep the dream of the Llanada Guild alive. The guild was responsible for making the very first donation to the building effort for Valley Children's Hospital in 1949.