I’ve seen young adults working as cashiers that don’t know how to count change. Meanwhile GS don’t seem to have this problem. In my experience anyway.
Supervision is for overly-cautious helicopter parents. Children need to learn the entrepreneurial spirit and negotiation skills on their own initiative. Witness:
Stranger
Some of the money goes to the council and some to the troop and that money goes to pay for activities for the girls. Who generally can’t pay for those activities on their own. I mean the parents might be able to but not the girls and I don’t think its a bad thing for the girls to spend a few hours selling cookies to pay for camp or whatever. Which is why I wouldn’t have bought from Moms sitting at the table without the girls, I’ll buy from parents passing an order form around work or other places children can’t go ( especially if someone asked them to bring the order form in) but door-to-door or a cookie booth , I will only buy from kids.
In reality sometimes
Kids are overbooked.
During my relatively short tenure in Girl Scouts during the early 70’s, I did go door to door in our own neighborhood by myself. I was so pathetically shy that my sales pitch was basically, “You don’t want to buy any cookies, do you?” and I was every bit as successful as you might imagine. My mom finally agreed to take an order form to work with her, but because she was a supervisor, she would only ask the people on her level and above. If I wanted to try selling to the people she supervised, I had to go with her one afternoon and ask them myself without her in sight. I don’t remember my troop doing any booth sales, but that might not have been a thing yet.
My kids weren’t in GS, but they were involved in other activities that required fundraising for trips, and they and their teammates were always active and present to do that fundraising (and I will never stop being grateful that I’m through with that part of my life).
Same. I don’t judge parents or kids for wanting to use opportunities to continue fundraising for their organization even if the kids can’t or don’t want to be there (and as chela said, sometimes kids have too much to do already).
But IMHO if it turns into a routine expectation for GS parents to do this, then that just becomes one more damn thing that parents (especially moms) are supposed to be doing to support their children. And parents also have too much to do already.
Youth organizations naturally tend to accept parents taking on their children’s nominal responsibilities for the organization, because adults tend to be more responsible and effective than kids, so the success rate tends to be higher. But ISTM that that’s ultimately just placing more extra burdens on parents. Besides taking attention and effort away from the mission of helping kids become more responsible and effective in their own right.
I was a Girl Scout decades ago (1980s) and the cookie booth was a regular part of our yearly sale. You did the door to door AND the booth.
My dad was the Cookie Dad so he did all the ordering. I think he absolutely loved it because he was a bread delivery driver for a short time. That job involved a lot of math and ordering product, just like running the cookie sales.
Girl Scouts is part girls learning/having fun and part service. They know going in that selling cookies helps pay for their programs.
Some girls and their families sell a lot of cookies, and some aren’t able to sell much at all. The local grocery stores have 2-hour time slots you can sign up for to sell, and you can go door-to-door. Nobody minds if you don’t, because they know that lots of families don’t have the same time available or parent connections through work. But it’s totally not acceptable for the girls to stay in bed while Mommy sells the cookies at the store for them. Unless the kid is actually sick, they need to be there.
Agreed.
Now that’s creative (and smart) marketing! 
I agree with everyone that the parents should not sell the cookies at the store without the girls. If they want to pass around an order slip at their place of work, and ask their friends too, that’s one thing, but letting the girls sleep in while they do the work is all kinds of wrong. I know we don’t know the “full story”, but if there really was a legit reason, I’d think the mom would say so, as it sounds really bad otherwise.
Several years back we had a man and his daughter come to our house to take an order. I put in an order for 3 boxes, and they were to come back to drop them off and I’d pay then…they never came back (I could have been out, but they had my phone number too and never called). I ended up buying some at the grocery store…and yes, the girls were there with their moms.
Truly. When I found out some ten years ago that the local council nets a mere quarter a box I stopped buying the cookies and give the moppet $5 instead.
Cite? I’m not seeing anything remotely close to that anywhere online.
https://www.girlscoutsdiamonds.org/content/dam/girlscouts-girlscoutsdiamonds/documents/cookies/More%20Questions%20about%20Where%20Cookie%20Money%20Goes.pdf
So, where exactly does cookie money* go?
One hundred percent of the money that a council and its troops raise through the Girl Scout Cookie Program stays with that council and its troops. Let there be no question: all of the revenue from cookie activities—every penny after paying the baker—stays with the Girl Scout council. Girl Scout councils offer a wide variety of recognition items, program- and store-related credits, and travel experiences that girls are eligible to earn individually based on their sales. Girl Scout councils do not provide any portion of their cookie revenue to Girl Scouts of the USA.
At Girl Scouts of Southeast Florida , $3.36 of the $3.88 in revenue generated from each box of cookies sold goes directly to the girls, in the form of troop proceeds, girl rewards and the delivery of Girl Scout program. That’s 86.6%! For a breakdown on How the Cookie Crumbles, click here .
I don’t think it was the council that got a quarter a box - pretty sure that was the troop. The council gets the bulk of the profit to run the camps and other activities - which is mostly what I see people complain about , that the council gets more money than the troop. But the council provides the camps and some events and activities, which usually cost money - when it’s Girl Scout day at the ice skating rink or the planetarium and so on, it’s not free to the council although it may be free for the Scouts. I’ve known troops that didn’t really do any troop activities - they did activities but mostly the ones provided by the council.
ETA there a link in @needscoffee 's article that breaks it down - there’s $3.88 profit on each box of cookies. $0.94 goes to the troop, $0.13 goes to rewards and the remaining $2.81 goes to the council $0.06 for advertising $0.46 management and fundraising and $2.29 goes to Girl Scout programs
Maybe they’ve already learned a very important life lesson. If they’re sick, or otherwise have the parents thinking they can’t come w/ them, the parents do all their work and they pocket the money.
25 years later they become CEO of a Fortune 500 company, and dear old Mom and Pop get to live w/ them in a mother in law apartment.
I’m not going to the store looking to buy overpriced cookies, popcorn, candy bars, etc., but I’m usually a sucker for kids selling stuff in those settings because I had to do it a lot as a kid and know that it’s not easy and not the top choice of what a kid wants to do on a weekend morning. Not having the girls participate is lame and defeats the whole purpose of the activity. I’m not going to reward that by purchasing something I didn’t really want in the first place.