Last I heard, the Girl Scouts gave girls a URL that was coded with their name, and you went online, ordered, they got the credit, and delivered the cookies when they came in, or made some other arrangement.
In my day, 9, 10 & 11-yr-olds were peddling door-to-door, knocking on strangers’ doors, frequently after dark, and in uniform, if you thought it would help you sell (or if you were wearing it because it was meeting day).
I did develop some ingenuity. I made the wagon deeper by anchoring a cardboard box into it with twine (packaging tape failed), and then connected the handle to my bike carrier, making a kind of U-joint with bungee cords (tape helped there). My parents did at least invest in an orange flag for the back of the wagon.
Anyway, the mid-80s >>> Stranger Danger! <<< pretty much put a stop to door-to-door selling. That’s when the storefront selling started.
It took a while for the Girl Scouts to recognize that snacks are an impulse buy. I could always resist them when they were pre-sell. Not so much with the stack of boxes atop a folding table outside the grocery store.
What a terrible choice. Because of the ComEd program, lightbulbs were about the only thing we never ran out of.
In the 70’s and 80’s, we sold Kathryn Beich candy bars. I use the term ‘sold’ loosely because they good enough to sell themselves. Selling amounted to walking around with a box of bars and taking people’s money. I remember once, while walking home from school, getting stopped by some strangers in a van asking to buy some candy. Looking back, it’s pretty much the inverse of a parent’s worst fear.
I graduated high school in 1984 and at one point in junior high or high school, we were selling theater boxes for $0.50 after paying $0.25 for them. Sold lots of them in class.
Weirdly, I saw a World’s Finest Display at the store today! This was in Seattle, but the hospital it’s supporting is in Portland, where the grocery chain is based.
LOL! More than once, I’ve seen kids from the nearby elementary school walking by my apartment with those boxes, and I stepped out and purchased candy from them.
1.54 goes to the cost of the cookie program (paying for the cookies, distribution costs, credit card costs, etc.)
$1.35 goes to the local troop which is selling the cookies, and to pay for rewards for the girls who sell the cookies
$3.03 goes for “member support” (financial assistance for members, volunteer support and training, customer service support, maintenance of camp properties and program facilities, and other member resources)
$1.08 goes to “girl programming and experiences” (experiences that support the Girl Scout Leadership Experience, support of Higher Awards, equine care, and other girl programs)
None goes to that child labour sales force! Exploitation! Join the union!
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This is an occasional plot element in American films and TV shows, but it’s non-existent in Europe (at least where I live), so please pardon my ignorance and explain the whole thing to me. I know what Girl Scouts are, and of course I know what cookies are, but the concept of Girl Scout cookies is mysterious to me.
No you basically got it!
A few minor corrections.
As some others pointed out, it’s not a “guilt trip”. People (like my family) actively wait for the January-ish sales window when parents with Girl Scouts start taking orders so we can stock up on Thin Mints, Samoas, and Tagalongs for the year!
It very much is an industrial product. Think of the Girl Scouts of America as more of a cookie company whose primary marketing channel is tiny girls with green sashes they don’t have to pay!
“Pay for rewards for the girls” and “financial assistance for members” both go to the child labor force. It’s probably not in the form of liquid cash, but there are fees for camping trips and the other fun experiences they go on, and they probably get credit that they can apply towards those fees (and if they’re not interested in doing all of those things, why are they in Scouts?).
I don’t know what kind of prizes they get for selling cookies nowadays, but I sold enough cookies (and nuts - this was in the late 1970s) to go to camp almost for free.
When I was a boy scout, a very long time ago, there was a thing in the UK called “Bob a Job”. Essentially, the idea was that a couple of scouts would do odd jobs for a small amount of cash. (A “bob” was one twentieth of a Pound). It was started in 1949 and finally discontinued in 1992. AFAIK the funds raised went mostly to the troop involved.
However, by the sixties, the practice was already dying out with parents concerned about safety and safeguarding. In more recent times it became a group activity – car washing was popular.
I recall long ago we parents were expected to tromp around the neighborhood taking cookie orders from the neighbors on a Sunday afternoon. This was in the middle of snowstorms and I flat out refused to do it. (and one would NEVER EVER send a kid out alone unless an adult was loitering behind as a bodyguard). Later we moved to a table outside Sears at the mall which was fun enough, and then to the BIG mall on the main concurse. We would work our shift and then the next parents and GS would take over, and so it went. A pain packing up all the stuff! One year we got out of the BIG mall just before a gang war broke out and cops were called. So, in dealing with the public, we want to support the scouts and give them life experience. Or just provide a desired snack online, to be delivered, easy peasy.
I was in Boy Scouts in the 1960s in the US. The Boy Scouts had NO idea what to sell as a fundraiser. I remember trying to sell Thanksgiving napkins in October. I went door to door, almost farther than I went Halloweening ( and my brother and I and a couple of neighbors did this big, going about a dozen blocks east and west of our main nieghborhood). I hardly sold any.
OTOH, later as an adult, I became a community organizer and that experience of walking up to a door and knocking on it made me feel like I had learned something. Some of this was about absorbing and pissing away rejection, but some was rote learning.
I have always admired, and bought, Girl Scout cookies. Thin Mints are crack.
As a former Scout leader who had to take part in this, you’re right. It’s almost non-stop from the people who come to the sales booth. And the stuff was crazy expensive. And as someone else pointed out, they actually didn’t want donations, because all of the goals were # of sales driven, not $ amount. So a donation was better than nothing, but not as good as a sale.
And parents got just as obsessive with this as they did the pinewood derby. We had one guy take the order form to work and incentivize his employees to buy with perks like longer breaks, easier work, etc. He sold a boatload and his kid had nothing to do with it.
A mother and daughter used to knock on my door once a year selling girl scout cookies, and I always bought about 3 or 4 boxes of thin mints. Either the scout grew out of it, or they moved away or something, but they don’t come around anymore.
(ETA: I kept the cookies in my freezer, naturally. Has that been discussed in this thread? That’s where you keep your thin mints.)
I remember selling Coca-Cola trays to a nice pair of old ladies around the corner from our house. I think we got cookies from them, too. I later realized that an 8-year-old in Cub Scout uniform, accompanied by his nearly identical but smaller 7-year-old uniformed little brother created a nexus of cuteness too mighty to resist, but at the time, I did not recognize our power.
Unless things have changed since I was involved *, no funds go to individual scouts. It’s all collective. Rather than having giving a girl $X in credit to pay her camping/ice skating/whatever fee and giving another girl $Y , the council or troop uses the revenue to pay for trips and experiences by lowering the amount the girls/parent have to cover.
* I doubt it has changed , because having both a son and a daughter I was involved in both Boy Scouts and Girls scouts. At that time,some Boy Scout troops had “individual Scout accounts” and there was a lot of discussion regarding the IRS and keeping the troops non-profit status and maybe it could be seen as income to the boys and so on.
My troop has those. But it’s just a bookkeeping thing so that we can keep track of how much an individual Scout contributes (by their labor) to different fundraisers (like working at a troop car wash or the annual flower sale). They can spend the money for summer camp, High Adventure activities, jamborees, campouts, etc. But they can’t cash it out if/when they leave the troop, so it’s not considered to be income (so says our accountant). Instead, if they have a balance when they leave it reverts to the troop.
