None of the Hash House Harriers' chapters in the world are money makers, I think that most of them probably come really close to operating at a loss. Despite our silly exterior and apparent ways, we do actually have an accounting team of sorts and we do keep track of how much money we are taking in and if there is any excessive amount of money left over, we will buy things for the members. The idea here isn't to make money, this was never a business.
There are certain events that in the past we have over-bought some level of merch though and we can't just have this stuff sitting around. This is true all around the world so to combat that and bring in a bit of money that is just going to be used for beer and fuel for our taxis anyway, we will have some "merch" for sale at our events.
The person in charge of this is the Haberdasher and everything they sell is normally decent quality stuff and they are selling it probably for around the same price that was paid for it.
So if you are at an event and you see a bunch of shirts or hats or whatever that are draped across a car there is a good chance that someone is not just doing their laundry on site. Those things are for sale.
You'll notice that almost all members of the Hash House Harriers have some sort of commemorative shirt and it becomes a point of pride after a while to collect as many of these things as possible. It's kind of like the people that go to big concerts and buy a shirt for the event but without the extremely inflated prices.
Every shirt in that picture is a Hash Shirt of some sort and there isn't a single repeated one. That is because for every major event a big part of the process is having a shirt made that you can show off to other people as they wonder why your shirt has a bunch of random crude swear words on it.
There always end up being leftovers though and even if you weren't at the event, it is kind of important to end up with a Hash shirt on your back at these events if you want to stick with the company culture, so to speak.
I was once voted in as the Haberdasher because it is kind of a role they give to people who are new-ish but still want to get involved to a certain degree. The only job you have is to carry an extra bag to events and have them for sale. Nobody is going to steal from these things so it's not like you have to keep a watchful eye on them. For the most part the prices per item are made up on the spot and it will never be more than a few dollars.
The added bonus at the end is that you too will now have some semblance of a silly uniform like everyone else in attendance, and that is always a good thing. It is a conversation starter and later on in your life in the Hash your Hash Name will appear on a lot of these shirts as well.
So shell out a few bucks and help the Hash out, we aren't Wal-Mart, we don't keep careful inventory and when we order shirts or other Hash stuff, we normally just ballpark it and will almost always have too many of them. We treat our commemorative shirts the same way we treat our beer: It is better to have too much of the stuff than not enough.
