Which grocery store do you go to that has “good” cookies?
Most of the stores I’ve been to have a 40 foot aisle full of crappy cookies. I like GS cookies.
Keebler makes cookies identical to several GS cookies year round, notably Samoas.
I don’t think Christmas and Easter are good comparisons, as neither was established to make money, but your basic point is correct.
What if you had a plane on a giant treadmill?
There’s also the issue of adjacent councils. Different councils sell different cookies at somewhat different times of the year , so that while cookies may be sold only for a four week period by a particular council , I can probably get cookies at least six months out of the year. ( I live and work in NYC, and my coworkers could have daughters in at least four different councils) I’ve never seen cookies sold or delivered between May and September- I suspect both because of the effects of heat on chocolate and because many troops suspend meeting during the summer.
Exactly. Are Samoas the peanut butter ones? Nutter Butters.
Samoas are the caramel-coconut ones with chocolate stripes on top and a flat chocolate base underneath.
The Keebler version of Samoas for those curious: http://www.keebler.com/product-keebler-coconut-dreams-cookies-21913.aspx?category=cookies
I don’t think I’ve ever seen these and I adore Thin Mints. Do you know who makes them or what the packaging looks like? I need to know if my store carries them! Of course then I won’t have to worry about resizing my engagement ring since I’ll certainly regain the weight if I have nonstop access to Thin Mints!
I think the GS peanut butter sandwich cookies taste a bit better than Nutter Butters… but they’re close.
If you like Girl Scout cookies, then all of them? There’s nothing magical about Girl Scout cookies, they’re the same quality of any other food product that is manufactured in quantities best quantified in scientific notation.
I refuse to buy Girl Scout cookies because I don’t want to teach young girls that is ok to prostitute their cuteness for financial gain. (And I only really like the peanut butter ones and I shouldn’t eat them in the quantity in which they’re sold.)
Ooooh that says they’re available at the grocery store that I typically go to. Now to find them among the 5 million other cookies…
It depends on how you look at it. I think it’s a good idea that children should learn things they want have to be paid for, and helping to contribute to things they want is positive.
Dollar General sells thin mint cookies as well as other Girl Scout Cookie clones under their “Clover Valley” label. I can’t tell the difference.
“…prostitute their cuteness for financial gain.” ?!? - Geez, what are you, a femi-nazi?
Selling the cookies teaches girls about economics (supply & demand is a *good *thing) as well as group participation, teamwork, charity, effort and reward etc. It also lets them go out into the world and meet and interact with new & different people. You know, it builds character, helps to make them a well-rounded person? Kinda the whole point of Girl Scouts in general?
I’m the most cynical, sarcastic guy imaginable but even I know this!
And what’s with everyone down on the quality of Girl Scout cookies?! I used to buy a bunch every year from my co-workers daughters and Girl Scout cookies are most definitely not generic, “Jim’s Kookies” fair. They’ve always been top-tier quality, akin to Oreos™ or Chips Ahoy™!
Its win-win: The girls get money for supplies, and because you’re essentially donating to charity you get to not feel too guilty about buying a case of something that you’d probably never normally fill your shopping cart with (even once a year)!
That’s just me saying things to shock my wife, though if it would sell more cookies I’m pretty sure they’d use puppies trained to bark something that sounds like “would you like to buy some cookies” instead of 8-year-olds in pig tails. I don’t buy the cookies because I really shouldn’t eat the cookies.
I thought the whole point was for parents to be able to get all their kids out of the house some weekends a year.
I agree that they’re just as good as Oreos or Chips Ahoy. I disagree that this is a particularly high bar of quality. It’s not a great sign when people buy enough of your baked good product to last the year until the next time they can buy.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, selling stuff to raise money is a time-honored tradition. Most youth organizations want as many kids to participate as possible, so they charge dues that are nominal. The sprog’s soccer league, for example, charges YMCA members $60 for the season. This covers the salary of the coordinators/trainers, some of the equipment, and some of the field maintenance. (They have their own private fields and full-time coordinators/trainers.) If you can’t afford the $60 and want your kids to play soccer, they’ll work something out. They also have a fundraiser to keep the fee at $60. When Airman and I looked at the Cub Scouts, the dues for each pack were a few dollars per week, but they all sell aggressively. (This was a turn-off for us, for reasons I’ll get to shortly. Fortunately, the sprog did not yen to be a Cub Scout, so that spared us all a lot of grief.)
That being said, constant sales of any product by any group burns a lot of goodwill from parents, family and friends. Parents bear the brunt of most sales efforts; they’re expected to bring the order sheets and catalogs to work, approach family and friends, collect money, pick up and distribute the stuff when it’s delivered, and generally manage the whole shebang. The sprog’s room mother has three kids who are in different activities, some of which are supported entirely or partly by sales of stuff. There have been years when her kids were selling something pretty much all of the time. (That the children’s fundraising season generally runs concurrent with the school year all but guarantees that this can happen.) When you’ve got three kids selling (some groups that have siblings as members require each sibling to sell separately), and parents have to manage so many campaigns, they get pissed off because it’s their time and energy. One local group increased its sales activities for one reason or another and lost members because the parents weren’t willing to spend that time and energy on something that really wasn’t essential. (ISTR it was a church-related group.)
Most groups also work with a small handful of companies that handle children’s fundraising, so the product selection is limited to candy and snack foods, frozen pizza and cookie dough, magazine subscriptions, and wrapping paper and other “gift” items. There is only so much wrapping paper or even Girl Scout cookies that one person can buy, and when you’re inundated with requests to buy stuff for this activity or that troop, you learn to say no, or you buy from everyone at the risk of alienating someone, or you wind up with Very Bad situations where the boss uses his position to force his subordinates to buy stuff from his kids.
From a business standpoint, the Girl Scouts have a winning model. They offer a unique product that most people know and like, that product is strongly identified with that organization, and there are multiple sales channels, including the possibility for an impulse buy if you encounter a table at a supermarket; if you don’t know any Girl Scouts, you can still buy cookies from a local troop. That they only sell this product a few weeks out of the year increases its desirability, because people will buy a lot of cookies knowing they won’t be able to get them year-round. Finally, there is some transparency in terms of where the money goes, at least at the local level.
And this is a biggie right here: The GSUSA and local councils are tax-exempt organizations and are subject to limitations on their sales at the state and federal levels to make sure they can keep that status. In Pennsylvania, for example, 503(c)(3) groups, which includes the Scouts, are only allowed to sell for a total of seven days before they have to pay taxes on their sales. (The local troops aren’t the ones that pay taxes; this is generally covered either by a higher level of the organization or the distributor.) At the federal level, there is often a fine line between a 503(c)(3) group and a business, and the Girl Scouts have to make sure they toe that line. Limiting the period when cookies are sold is one way of toeing that line.
That’s something I wonder about, did things change or was my experience as a kid atypical?
There were always a lucky few kids in class who had a parent that would sell for them at work but that was the exception (and we hated them for it because it meant we had no chance at the good prizes). When we kids had a fundraiser, we kids were expected to go out and raise the funds. We went door to door, without parents in tow. We had to go in and ask a store manager if it was ok for us to sit outside and then we did it, sans parents.
Now, the closest I come to a kid trying to sell me something is
<mom whispering in the background>Ask him if he wants to buy cookies.
<kid>Do you want to buy cookies.
And often the only person at the cookie table are the adults while the kids are messing around nearby shouting out '“cookies”.
So was this unusual (grew up in the '80s) or is that all a fatality of the recent discovery that if a child is ever out of direct line of sight of an adult they turn to dust and blow away?
(snipped)
Thanks for the laugh! With permission, totally going to steal that line.
In seriousness, I think it’s because it’s actually easier for the parents to do it themselves. I know it’s counterintuitive, but when the kids are really involved, the parent still has to oversee the kid’s progress, make sure everything is done properly, nag the kid to actually participate to the desired level, and deal with all the stress from the kid as well as managing all the actual product sales and distribution.
I bet there’s also a certain expectation of levels of sales that parents are made very aware of, so the parent can’t just let Junior slack off, because Mom will hear about it from the other parents for the rest of her days in that organization. So, the easiest thing to cut out of that whole stressful process is the kid. I think that it’s pretty easy to go from “helping” to “doing it myself because if he/she does it he/she’ll mess up and then I’ll have to re-do it anyway.”