Lousy reporting- 17K boxes of girl scout cookies

[Hampshire]

I really, really hate fluff pieces that fail to go into detail so the reader can get an actual idea of how something happened.

Girlscout sells 17,000 boxes of cookies

So from the story it sounds like a girl just set up a table on a street corner, put in a lot of hours, and just happens to sell 17,000 boxes.
Details please??
Oh, I don’t know, maybe

1. How many days did it take her to sell this many?
2. They quote her as saying “basically we never closed”. So were they running at this corner 24 hours a day?
3. Any bulk sales? Like a few company executives buying a few thousand boxes at a time?
4. Any family members/friends/relatives selling them for her on the side?
5. Just where was this “magic corner” that generated all these sales? Business district? Commercial? Residential?

Why are reporters so lazy in finding out a few details. The whole “HOW” part of the story.
Or do they purposely leave out the details to sensationalize it?

[Ellen_Cherry]

Well, here’s a guess. It’s a wire story, so it’s probably a rewrite of a longer story published in the town where it actually happened. That story most likely had more details.

However, this story seems to say that she sold them ONLY through on-the-corner sales, which leads me to believe that this might in fact be how she accomplished it. Period.

[Santo_Rugger]

@Ellen Cherry

Well, here’s a guess. It’s a wire story, so it’s probably a rewrite of a longer story published in the town where it actually happened. That story most likely had more details.

However, this story seems to say that she sold them ONLY through on-the-corner sales, which leads me to believe that this might in fact be how she accomplished it. Period.

Period, huh? Well, if we assume she worked the booth 25 hours a week, for 3 months straight, she’d be averaging a box of cookies per minute during the entire time. It’s just barely feasible, sure, but I’d say the OPs 3 and 4 surely came into play.

Which is the point of the OP. Neither of us can claim to be right, because the story didn’t tell us, and we don’t realistically have any way to do the research ourselves.

[Bryan_Ekers]

Perhaps the alleged sale of cookies was just a way to launder money from her ring of scout-uniformed call girls.

At least, that’s what I’ll choose to believe.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

The real question here is “why on earth do you care?”

Did she break your record or something?

[scout1222]

She sure as hell broke mine, that’s for sure.

[Litoris]

@Really Not All That Bright

The real question here is “why on earth do you care?”

Did she break your record or something?

Maybe because girl scout cookies are evil ?

[gonzomax]

I have driven by the location often They have s a van, a big sign and they are there all the time.

[Ellen_Cherry]

I agree it’s somewhat sketchy; that’s the nature of wire stories. But the reason I said “period” is that this:

Sharpe sold cookies every day on a street corner with help from her mother and troop leader, Pam Sharpe.
“We were always there, we never closed,” Pam Sharpe said. “At one point, Jenny got really sick and we did shut down early, and we heard about it the next day.”

explains how they were able to sell so many: They were there every day all day long. I expect that some people bought several boxes. People came back and bought more boxes; they knew she was trying to sell a lot of cookies. “We heard about it the next day,” the mother said. From that I infer that people were helping her in her quest, and bought a lot. I don’t think it’s sensationalizing things to omit detailing every single person who bought from her. Perhaps, as I said earlier, there were more details in the earlier version and the AP trimmed it down to the essentials: they were on a street corner every day for weeks.

The media is bad enough without holding this up as an example of the worst they do, IMHO.

[Duck_Duck_Goose]

Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Scout makes cookie sales record crumble
Dearborn girl smashes record by selling nearly 3,000 more boxes than sold in any other season.
Steve Pardo / The Detroit News

< snip >

She set her sights on the world record when she was in the third grade. She watched her sister honored for being a thousand-box seller. And at the ceremony, another Metro Detroit girl was honored with the local record-breaking sales of 10,100 boxes.

"I remember saying, ‘Mom, that’s going to be me one day,’ " Sharpe said.

She broke that record last year, clearing 12,000 boxes. And then someone from the Girl Scouts told her she was only a few thousand boxes shy of the national record.

She set a new goal that night.

“She just loves to sell cookies. Even when she’s standing out there in the cold,” said Dianne Thomas, spokeswoman for the Girl Scouts of Metro Detroit. “She set a goal for herself of 15,000 this year and she just crushed it.”

< snip >

The cookie selling season is short – five weeks from February through March. Pamela Sharpe figured they had to sell 500 boxes a day to beat the record.

They set up shop at their old standby, where the Sharpe family has sold tens of thousands of cookies over the years: the parking lot of the Cherry Hill Presbyterian Church off Telegraph.

The family pickup was decorated with Girl Scout paraphernalia advertising cookies and there, six days a week, they would sit. They’d clear out of the church parking lot on Sundays for the parishioners and set up a stand at a Kroger or outside an automotive store.

“During cookie season we do nothing else,” Pamela Sharpe said. “In this house, we eat, breathe and sleep cookies.”

And sell. Jennifer Sharpe often utilizes the classic “up sell.” If you buy four $3.50 boxes and customers hand her a $20 bill, she’ll tell you that for only a dollar more you can get another box.

So there ya go.

Motivation.
It took them five weeks.
The entire family helped.
Seven days a week of aggressive selling.
At a location where they always sell cookies.
Lots of advertising.
They offered discounts.

[Ellen_Cherry]

I love this girl.

“It’s so exciting,” Sharpe said. “I’ve got like, five enemies at school who say, ‘You’re so geeky. You’re in the Girl Scouts.’ But I’m like, ‘Yeah, but I’m going to Europe while you’ll be watching TV and stuffing your face.’”

[Omegaman]

And to think I didn’t get even one box this year.

[Duckster]

Too bad the media didn’t hype the other story about the Girl Scouts who are boycotting selling girl scout cookies:

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Two middle-school students who started a project to earn a Girl Scout award have ended up rejecting what may be the best known of their organization’s symbols: Girl Scout Cookies.

Madison Vorva and Rhiannon Tomtishen, both 12, started doing research last fall on endangered orangutans in Indonesia as part of their Bronze Award project. They discovered the habitat of orangutans is being threatened by conversion of the land to the production of palm oil, an ingredient in Girl Scout Cookies.

Although the two have sold many boxes of cookies over the years, this year they sold magazines instead.

“Just doing the Bronze Award wouldn’t be enough,” Madison said.

Rhiannon agreed. “We have stopped selling [the cookies],” she said.

So one girl sells cookies to self-indulge herself with a record and goes to Europe, but two other girl scouts would rather think of others first.

[Contrapuntal]

@Duck Duck Goose

So there ya go.

Motivation.
It took them five weeks.
The entire family helped.
Seven days a week of aggressive selling.
At a location where they always sell cookies.
Lots of advertising.
They offered discounts.

It’s weird that she gets a record when the entire family sells the cookies.

Where do you see a reference to discounts?

[Duck_Duck_Goose]

This is $2.50 off a box, innit?

If you buy four $3.50 boxes and customers hand her a $20 bill, she’ll tell you that for only a dollar more you can get another box.

ETA: She can do that because she’s not after “dollar amount”–she’s only interested in “total number of boxes of cookies”. So presumably the Girl Scout troop eats the difference.

[Happy_Lendervedder]

I drove by this girl’s set-up daily. They had signs on the busy street basically advertising a “drive-thru” girl scout cookie service. It was pretty cool. People were often times lined up to get in there.

[Duck_Duck_Goose]

Oh, nevermind, I see what it’s saying–for $21 you can get another box. So it’s not a discount.

But I bet she sold extra boxes of cookies to a lot of people just like me who interpreted it as “$2.50 off a box”, and who were too buffaloed to refuse when she smilingly held out her hand for another dollar.

[Inigo_Montoya]

@Duck Duck Goose

This is $2.50 off a box, innit?

More lousy reporting. The pich is “If you buy 5 $3.50 box of cookes, etc.”

Which is still a crock because they were $3.25 this year. At least in my 'hood.

[Autolycus]

Damn orangutans. First they kill my family and now they won’t let me have girl scout cookies? That’s two strikes. One more and I say get rid of them.

[pulykamell]

@Inigo Montoya

More lousy reporting. The pich is “If you buy 5 $3.50 box of cookes, etc.”

No. The pitch is, you’ve just given me $20 for four boxes of cookies. I can give you your change or, for just one more dollar, you can get a fifth box. There’s no bad reporting there. It’s a normal upsell technique and I thought it was a perfectly well written sentence.