Supermarket Sweep: Community turns out for event

Four lucky winners got up to 11 minutes each to shop for a $1,000 worth of groceries as part of the Beautiful Day Supermarket Sweep fundraiser held at Delbert’s in Comanche last Tuesday.

The foundation had sold raffle tickets to win the opportunity in the 29 schools it serves in. Each school received tickets to sell in their respecitive community. Beautiful Day celebrates student birthdays with a party every month on the indvidual school campuses.

A community celebration with free food, a bounce house and live musical entertainment, was also held in the grocery store’s parking lot before the winners made their runs.

The winners who sped around the aisles and loaded up as many shopping carts as they could were Debra Blaylock of Chickasha, Tabitha Waid of Duncan, Tim Johnson of Pernell and Andrea Griffin of Yukon.

If a contestant loaded up more than $1,000 worth of groceries, the excess was returned to the store shelves.

Kelsey Roberts, Beautiful Day executive director was extremely pleased with the event’s outcome. Overall, the Supermarket Sweep fundraiser tallied more than $32,000 for the organization.

“It exceeded our expectations,” Roberts said. “I think the contestants had a lot of fun, but I also wanted to note how great the community of Comanche did supporting this event. There were businesses that said ‘yes,’ that they would love to donate. And, there were individuals who donated things, so I’m really proud of how great a community Comanche is to host this for the Beautiful Day Foundation and I think everybody had a wonderful time.”

With the success of this year’s inaugural event, the foundation is looking to do it again next year.

“I think we would like to do this again for our summer fundraiser,” Roberts said. “We’re definitely going to evaluate it and see what our board thinks, but everybody had a great time and we had a great turnout.”

As a contesetant, Waid enjoyed the experience tremendously of running around the store and shopping.

“It was so exciting, the energy was great in the store,” Waid said. “It was also great to bring attention to Beautiful Day in order to give them more opportunities to do celebrations.”

She was able to get her $1,000 worth of groceries in the allotted time. She focused much of her efforts on the meat aisle.

“I grabbed a lot of meat - steaks, brisket, other cuts of meat and shrimp,” Waid said. “I wanted to fill up my freezer.”