By NOEL MURPHY
IT MIGHT seem a humble sausage sizzle but the barbie at the local supermarket, hardware store or butcher shop is a more valuable resource than many people realise.
The tempting aroma of hot snags wafting through shopping strips and centres of a weekend is in fact helping all clubs and groups the length and breadth of Geelong tackle all manner of community projects.
It might be a fire brigade, school, kids’ sporting club, maybe the family of a victim of tragedy, whatever, but the sausage economy is running rings around the traditional fund-raisers of chocolates and lolly drives. Onion rings, that is.
And businesses backing the community snag phenomenon, say it pays mutual dividends.
“It’s definitely a feel-good exercise,” said Cliff Dalgliesh of Geelong West’s Heritage Meats, who stumps up as much as 50kg of sausages a week for groups ranging from Vietnam vets and karate clubs to schools.
“Every Saturday morning they can make some handy money. We supply the barbecue and the snags, they buy bread, and people might come in and buy some meat.”
Faggs Mitre 10’s Mark Edmonds said the weekend barbie had become a hardware store fixture punters expected to see every weekend.
“If we don’t have one out the front, we get complaints, ‘Where are your snags?’,” he laughed.
“People look for them and see it as part of weekend shopping.
“It’s all a good atmosphere and helps people make money. And we’re getting more and more requests to hold them.”
A staffer at one local supermarket, who wished to remain anonymous, said community groups were greatly appreciative of the common snag’s fund-raising ability and requests to run barbecues were common. Rosters were filled months in advance.
Bunnings North Geelong complex manager Peter Muir said it was important to support local communities where its staff lived and worked.
“We’ve been offering local community groups groups the opportunity to run a sausage sizzle ever since we opened our first Bunnings Warehouse in 1994,” he said.
Stores told the Independent of varied sausage sizzle operating styles. Some provided barbecues, gas and cooking gear and discounts on sausages and sauces; some provided snags while the barbies were BYO; others put up tents, wash-up areas and advertising.
All provided free of charge that most valuable of resources for any business – people.
The cash that groups could earn in a session varied from a couple of hundred up to $2500, depending on the outlet and weather.
