The recent Girl Scout threads got me to thinking about this.
As I’m walking out of a Kroger one morning, I see a couple of moms with a table set up full of GS cookies. I step up to buy a box, and so does another lady right next to me.
The lady next to me asks: “Where are the girls”? (There were none to be seen) to which one of the moms responds: “Oh they didn’t want to get up this morning”.
I didn’t say anything, but I do remember thinking to myself that’s a little messed up. I mean, those girls aren’t going to learn any life lessons if they don’t put the work in.
I don’t remember learning any life lessons during Cub Scout bottle drives, other than “holy smoke, some people really have a lot of empty beer bottles in the garage”.
Yeah, messed up. I think I was a fairly permissive parent, but there is NO WAY I’d have let my kid get away with that (unless for a very good reason, like they were genuinely ill or had been up until 3am saving starving puppies or something).
My personal opinion is like how I think of other fundraisers. If Mom is just selling them to people she knows, that’s fine. Or if she’s selling them while the kids can’t, that makes sense. But doing it because they don’t want to get up does seem a bit weird.
Though I wouldn’t judge specifically here, as we don’t know the whole story. Maybe they’d been up all night doing something really important. Maybe mom is leaving out information.
So I wouldn’t judge 'em too much, but I’d also be less likely to buy this particular time.
Many, many GS cookies are sold by parents at work. You might see a picture of the kid, but that’s all. The ones that sit in store fronts to sell cookies for their kids are hardcore.
Do they require parents to do storefront sales? Because the people I see selling them at work aren’t the type to sit outside in the wind selling cookies.
As a scout leader, I try and get the scouts heavily involved in fund raising.
However, that’s an ideal, not a suicide pact, and not intended to make the kids miserable as punishment for wanting to be involved in scouting. Particularly with the girl scouts, they put a LOT of time into cookie sales, it’s no crime for the girls to take a morning off once in a while.
That could be taken as a more important life lesson than selling overpriced cookies at a huge markup to make buckets of money for the corporate leadership of GSUSA with free child labor.
I agree that the moms should not be selling the cookies rather than the Girl Scouts themselves.
But something I wonder about is when did the system change? Because as I remember from decades ago, the Girl Scouts took orders for cookies, and then delivered them to customers sometime later (weeks? months?). Now they have the cookies right there for sale, which I suppose is better for immediate gratification purposes.
When we got selling scheme paperwork from school it went right in the trash.
I wasn’t gonna sell it.
We had no neighbors.
All my friends and relatives had kids of their own selling the same stuff.
We have purchased a lot of Girl Scout cookies over the years from moms and dads of Girl Scouts we knew. Just some parents sitting at a table with no Girl Scouts is out of the ordinary. Maybe the comment that the girls didn’t want to get up was not meant to be taken literally, there could have been a good reason prevented they weren’t there. My wife was a Girl Scout, later a Scout Leader, and still occasionally active with them, I can see that in some cases the adult former scouts might be more into it than their daughters and doing it this time just for the benefit of the troop. We did buy a lot of cookies from her troop to get their numbers up. I can see it could be difficult enough to get young women involved in scouting at all, making them go through this time worn old fashioned fund raiser ritual probably isn’t helping.
A few years ago, when I was in Denver, there was a Girl Scout with her mom selling the cookies in the parking lot of a pot dispensary,
So if that innocent little girl can brave the cravings of stoners, damn straight other girls should have to get off their lazy butts and hustle for the sales.
It’s up to the troop to decide whether they want cookies on hand to sell or take orders. Booth selling is kind of a pain because you have to guestimate how many boxes you want to sell and then you’re stuck with them.
As far as whether the girls are actually the ones selling, IMHO there is a difference between a parent bringing a few boxes or an order sheet in for their coworkers, and no kids attending a scheduled cookie booth event at a store. As a former GS parent (not Mom, btw) who lived through a few cookie seasons, I would not have purchased from the parents in question.
Not only does a percentage of the sales go to the troop and council, but girls who sell certain amounts can get discounts on summer camps, trips, and other not-free programs, or at least they did when my sister and I were Scouts, me in the late 1970s and her in the early 1980s.
The mom might have said that to be sarcastic, and maybe this was when SHE could be there but the kids had something else going on.
As for kids’ fundraisers, there were a couple of situations where my nieces were doing that, and I simply donated money directly to the cause.
Could you explain why? I understand it’s not good messaging for an organization that supposed to be teaching young women responsibility and skills along with other qualities but is selling cookies to strangers from a card table going to provide a worthwhile lesson at all?
I do understand that isn’t a justification for doing it. I don’t know what would be a worthwhile method of fund raising that would teach a lesson these young women should have. The modern world is a harsh place to live.
