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
How many days did it take her to sell this many?
They quote her as saying “basically we never closed”. So were they running at this corner 24 hours a day?
Any bulk sales? Like a few company executives buying a few thousand boxes at a time?
Any family members/friends/relatives selling them for her on the side?
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?
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.
[QUOTE=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.
[/QUOTE]
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.
I agree it’s somewhat sketchy; that’s the nature of wire stories. But the reason I said “period” is that this:
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.
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.
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.
[/QUOTE]
It’s weird that she gets a record when the entire family sells the cookies.
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.
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.
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.
[QUOTE=Inigo Montoya]
More lousy reporting. The pich is “If you buy 5 $3.50 box of cookes, etc.”
[/QUOTE]
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.
