When I was young (circa 1980), the Cub Scouts would do a bottle drive. We would go door to door asking people to donate their glass bottles (which the Cub Scouts would bring back for the deposit). I remember being so excited when a guy would have hundreds of beer bottles in his garage, but it seems kind of depressing in retrospect.
Yeah, I have vague memories of that kind of thing happening when I was a Scout
I’ve never seen all the varieties of GSC discussed here for sale in Canada, just the mint ones (Gack! Hate chocolate and mint! I know, I’m the outlier) and the “cream” filled ones, sort of like Oreos, in vanilla and chocolate varieties. I find them ghastly. A co-worker brings them in regularly for sale, never seen the kid (not even sure there is one…), and that some people think the point of the exercise is to teach people the rudiments of capitalism makes me even more dubious.
Would add that even if the capitalism lessons are the point, the Girl Scouts aren’t being taught the lesson they should be getting from this, which is “your labour, and that of your parents, is being used to pay corporations and fund people and projects you may never see or use and certainly don’t get to determine or speak to. Join the union!”
Coincidentally, next week a documentary film called Cookie Queens opens in theaters. It was produced by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and the summary is “It’s Girl Scout Cookie season, and four tenacious girls strive to be a top-selling ‘Cookie Queen,’ navigating an $800 million business in which innocence and ambition collide.”
Well, absolutely, if the Girl Scout isn’t doing any work on her own, and it’s only the parent(s) who are beating the bushes to sell the cookies.
I’ve certainly had colleagues at my various jobs who had cookie order sheets for their daughters in the office; I also regularly see groups of Girl Scouts, with their parents (usually mothers), with tables set up outside of grocery stores; the latter ones are certainly more involved in the process.
Keebler Fudge Mint Delights come very close.
Joke is very old and already told in this thread-
Their reactions are hilarious.
When I was in 9th grade, I bought a box of Thin Mints from a Girl Scout in my English class who was selling them for $2/box (in the early ‘80s).
They are definitely like crack. I think I finished the box before the period was up. Not one of my prouder moments. 
A cousin’s daughter was a Girl Scout for a couple of years, and her troop sold an official GS cookie I had never seen before, nor since. It was a thumbprint-type cookie with raspberry jam in the middle. Her mom told me that their council got cookies from a different contract bakery so they had slightly different offerings. Those cookies were the best. Even better than Thin Mints.
I don’t recall selling anything when I was a Boy Scout (five years, more or less). Not popcorn, not candy, not peanuts, not light bulbs, not magazine subscriptions. Somehow we managed to have the full scouting experience without additional fundraising. I don’t know if the parents were getting dunned regularly by The Men or not. Now all the leadership is gone, and I doubt the few friends I still have from that troop know any more about the troop’s finances than I do.
Say what? Trick or treating is supposed to be after dark. (And I was a kid in the 1950’s; and have been various places where it was going on since.)
Maybe it was a local custom - I went out trick or treating immediately after school was out when I was in elementary school.
Yep, except for the real little kids, the kind escorted around by parent, who came around dusk.
When I was in Cub Scouts, in suburban Chicago, around 1974, the local council chose light bulbs for a fundraising drive. Which, frankly, was about the worst choice they could have made: at that time, Commonwealth Edison, the electrical utility for the Chicago area, had a popular program in which customers could regularly purchase light bulbs directly from the utility for a nominal charge. In other words, there was close to zero demand for light bulbs among our neighbors, etc., because the ComEd program was something that nearly everyone signed up for. What bulbs we did sell were undoubtedly purchased out of pity.
I’m looking at a Trail’s End popcorn tin right next to me (I reuse it for clip storage) and it explicitly has Boy Scout logos, rank insignia (from Tiger Cub to Eagle Scout), Scouts in uniform, etc.
(This particular tin is at least 10-15 years old. Among other things, it celebrates “100 Years of Scouting,” which was celebrated for Boy Scouts back in 2010.)
There’s a 1970 novel called Steady, Freddie! about a frog getting rescued from the zoo (he’s snake chow), only to get boxed up with some Girl Scout cookies.
The girls aren’t baking the cookies themselves, just wrapping, because the wrapping machine in on the fritz, IIRC, but there’s an old leader who constantly laments that the girls no longer bake the cookies.
Corbett was pretty prolific, and this is one of his more obscure books, but if you are my age (or a bit older), you might remember the “trick” books that began with The Lemonade Trick, or a truly scary book for kids starting chapter books on their own called The Red Room Riddle. > shivers <
Anyway, good writer.
But yeah, I remember selling Girl Scout cookies. The only reason we kept our old radio flyer wagon after my brother and I were out of preschool was so I could use it when I delivered cookies once I was a Girl Scout, which back then was 4th grade.
Back then, we went door-to-door and took orders. I was smart enough to start on my way home from the meeting where we got our order blanks, and covered the whole neighborhood. I stopped at home long enough to tell my mother what I was up to, drink a glass of milk, and promise I would eat dinner cold when I got back (no microwaves yet), and get my bicycle.
Meeting were on Wednesdays, and Friday morning, my whole troop, and a lot of other girls in the 4th & 5th grade were very mad at me. Somehow, I had “cheated.” I also went out of the bounds of my troop.
Damn, did I learn a lot.
Even more, when it came time to deliver all the cookies, which my parents would not drive me to do.
They have a lot of fun videos, especially British school kids trying American food.
When I was a Boy Scout back in the ‘80s, we sold Burger King coupon books. Pretty lame.
As a Scout leader a couple of decades later, our Scouts (including my son), sold the Trail’s End popcorn. It was mandatory in Cub Scouts. The Cub Scout had to sell (or have their parents buy) a minimum amount, or make a donation to the pack.
In Boy Scouts, it was not mandatory, so my son never sold popcorn again. It was pretty good popcorn, but it was (a) expensive; and (b) not nearly as good as Girl Scout cookies. However, some Scouts did make the effort.
Our troop instead primarily ran (and still runs) on troop fundraisers: the annual flower sale at Mother’s Day (supplied by a local grower), the annual paper shredding event, can collection drives, and car washes.
I vaguely remember that the Girl Scouts originally took advance orders for the cookies, which were then delivered weeks later. But now you see them set up outside the supermarket selling cookies for immediate purchase. So do they do both? Because it’s hard to beat the immediate gratification of buying cookies right then and there.
And I wonder about the stories about some Girl Scout somewhere who sold thousands of cookies. How do they accomplish that? Do they get someone to place a big bulk order?
Right, they do both. Same with the Trail’s End popcorn. There is also a way for people to buy online, and somehow the GS gets the credit.
They either have a lot of minions (like their parents, grandparents, etc.) selling on their behalf, or people are buying online and the GS is getting the credit.
Well, 2010 is more recent than my direct experience, so maybe they changed it.
Back when I was in Boy Scouts, we did do popcorn and light bulbs once or twice, but mostly we had our own fundraisers. I remember a pancake breakfast and a spaghetti dinner, and we also sold nut rolls every December that we made ourselves. We also operated a dunk tank a few times for local festivals; that was fun.
Christmas trees are also a fairly common Boy Scout fundraiser, but I don’t think my troop ever did that one.
There’ve been two or three varieties of lemon cookies, all of which were very good. My second choice, after Thin Mints.
Frozen Snickers bars were a thing when I was a kid (mid '60s).
How do you arrive at that conclusion?