Things have changed since you and I were kids. Kids are now strongly discouraged from going door-to-door for “safety reasons”, so parents are now being encouraged to bring this stuff to work. Although if a kid was ever kidnapped while going door-to-door, it’s news to me.
Regarding the involvement of parents, it varies by troop. Our Cookie Booths (sales outside the grocery store) are manned by the girls – they do all of the interaction with customers including making change, with a pair of adults on hand to supervise. The girls also set goals for how to spend the money (camping and activities) and donate part of the proceeds to charity.
We have a few girls whose parents sell a bunch at work, but all girls get involved at some point. It’s been great for our girls who are very shy – it’s wonderful to see them open up.
But we couldn’t do it all year long. We have at least one meeting reviewing etiquette, safety, picking a charity, setting goals, making signs, etc. for cookie season. The rest of the year we are learning to swordfight, doing service projects, learning pet care, making up plays, camping, going to the zoo, canoeing, attending singalongs, etc.
PS – our girls are 8!
This is one part that I don’t like. Sometimes it seems like the fundraising company is taking the majority of the profit and the children and their customers are a captive audience. If, for example, the children are selling candy, perhaps it would be cheaper to buy in bulk from Costco instead of the fundraising company.
First off, I absolutely hated fundraising. Every year, I was one of the parents who just wanted to give the $20 profit to the school instead of selling the box of candy. That said, there’s a cheaper source for nearly all of the fundraising items , but those cheaper sources don’t always work well as fundraisers. For example, when my kids were in school , they sold candy bars. Each child received a box with 40 $1 bars of candy, and each child had to turn in $40 to get another box or at the end of the sale. Any unsold boxes went back to the fundraising company. At my kids’ school, it would have been a nightmare keeping track of who got how many bars if the candy was bought in bulk at Costco - someone would no doubt be claiming they got only four ten-bar packages, not five.There was also a wrapping paper/gift sale. I know I can buy wrapping paper/ cheap gifts for less than those catalogs. What I don’t know is a place with a consistent enough selection to allow me to take orders in advance and you can’t send that stuff home with the kids as easily as you can send the boxes of candy. You can buy from a cheaper source, and hold a sale at the school, but now you’ve limited your customer base ,need to find parents who will commit a few hours at a specified time to running the sale and run the risk of having unsold merchandise.
I’ve been involved in just about every sort of fundraiser imaginable- everything from car washes and popcorn/candy sales to raffles that sell only 250 tickets at $100 each and Bingo games with bags of groceries for prizes. Girls Scout cookies was the easiest by far. They sell themselves. My daughter is 22 years old and hasn’t been a Girl Scout for nearly 10 years but my coworkers still call me looking to buy cookies