Is there any reason why I could not do the following:
Buy thousands of boxes of girl scout cookies from various local troops
Arrange proper storage
Set up a web site
Sell and ship girl scout cookies anywhere in the world, at a markup of course.
Now I realize there are rules against doing this for the girl scout troops, but how would the GSA stop me from reselling my perfectly legally purchased cookies.
The only thing I could think of is use of trademarked terms and such but I was under the impression that there is some kind of exception for retail advertising or else every failed product that ever was would be suing retailers for using their name just to recoup some of their losses.
You only have to make it clear that you’re reselling a product and that you don’t represent the Girl Scouts of America. You have right to resell what you own, and you have the right to identify what it is that you own to sell. You cannot, though, claim to be selling on behalf of the Girl Scouts (abuse their trademark). To avoid confusion and stay legal, you’d probably just have to make it blatently obvious that you’re not a Girl Scout.
Search here for a thread on Krispy Kreme donoughts being resold. KK closed down a reseller – probably unfairly.
You could get into trouble for showing the boxes, showing the names or pictures of the cookies, or even using the words Girl Scouts if you are not an authorized reseller.
That might be the difference between you and a retail grocer. I think that’s how Krispy Kreme got it’s resellers shut down.
However, there are hundreds of boxes of Girl Scout cookies being sold on ebay, many for less than cost. You need to factor that into your proposed markup.
On questions of “uncommon law”, it usually boils down to who has the most chutzpah.
If you were threatened with a lawsuit, of course you would stop. If you threatened them with a press release that could create more people like you all over, they would back down and ignore you.
And if it ever went to court, unusually cases are not as subject to presidence and case law as one would hope. The judges tend to simply side with a simple analogy, it’s either “like a free market”, or “it’s scalping”.