Pop Tops

I never understood why people collected pull tabs/pop tops (whatever). When I first saw my friend's family collecting them in elementary school, I thought they were nuts.

Well, I'm glad to be justified in that opinion now.

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Business (Keeping Tabs)

You hear about schools doing this all the time, and it makes no sense. But then, at my schools, we always did penny drives instead. The cleverest penny drive was Villa's -- there, we collected not only pennies but all sorts of currency. But it was a competition between the classes, with pennies being worth one point and everything else being worth its monetary value in negative points. That way, you could fill your class' jar with pennies and cancel out 25 of another class' pennies with one quarter.

Naturally, almost every class ended the contest with a negative total.