I'm not a cookie hater. Honest. In 2005, I even wrote an editorial defending Cookie Monster's right to devour as many treats as he wanted, whether or not he ate vegetables and fruits beforehand.
Girl Scouts are great too. My childhood memories of Troop 10 are very fond and it was exciting to see my granddaughter sign up as well a couple of years ago.
However, that's when I knew the relationship between Girl Scouts and cookies had changed. Cookie sales were no longer the pleasant, low-key experience of my childhood, when I would ask neighbors if they wanted to buy a box or two and eagerly wait for my family to buy a couple of boxes of Thin Mints (they were never enough for my taste buds). greedy tastes.
Like so many other children's activities, cookie sales have come under great pressure. Families are encouraged to commit to purchasing hundreds of boxes to sell (I considered it a phenomenal year if I sold 35 boxes). They are expected to pay the troops for the cookies not purchased.
Cookie sales, in these days of helicopter parents, are no longer just about raising a few dollars for the troop. No, it is now an activity that teaches scouts business skills. They are rewarded with badges such as: Cookie Manager, Cookie Networker, Cookie Innovator, Cookie Market Researcher and Cookie Influencer. It is a far cry from the usual badges of first aid, naturalistic and, nowadays, robotics.
It's like they're preparing their resumes for Harvard Business School applications. And I had naively thought for years that learning how to make butterfly bandages as an explorer was a pretty big accomplishment.
There is a kind of commission system. This year, selling 355 boxes will net you a stuffed axolotl, an adorable, endangered Mexican salamander, for the right networking and influencer explorer. Ritzier prizes are awarded to those who sell the most, and there are also explosive prizes, such as axolotl socks, for the explorer who sells only 125 cases. There is also an “Avatar Crossover Patch” with a complicated list of requirements that I refuse to consider.
What I do know is that none of this resembles the Scouting values I was most familiar with: service, exploration and life skills, a healthy counterweight to materialism and peer pressure. I guess marketing is considered a basic life skill these days.
I also don't like the idea of setting scouts up against each other for prizes (or posting their sales online, as some troops have done), especially when some are in a better position to attract customers. Some parents can afford to make a major purchase and simply give away boxes. Other parents have workplaces that make it easy to convince coworkers to buy, or have large social networks. These have nothing to do with a girl's cookie fighting skills.
Because, let's face it, girls who make mega-sales rarely do it themselves. Their parents, usually their mothers, are the real “cookie bosses.” They're the ones posting for clients on Nextdoor and Facebook and carrying dozens of boxes to work. My daughter tells me about a mom scout who developed a sophisticated spreadsheet to track sales; another places large signs that say “Ask me about Girl Scout Cookies” on the doors of her car. (You can find them on Amazon, for $40 a pair.) How does a girl learn to be a “cookie innovator” when her parents do the work?
There are also parents who are fed up with this. Someone ranted on an online forum in 2016: “This [scout leader] I ordered literally hundreds of boxes of cookies per girl, completely ignored everyone's estimates of how many we thought we could sell, and now she is absolutely furious that we couldn't sell them all… Now she's trying to tell me that our family will be financially responsible for the cookies that were not sold. Yeah, I don't think so.”
“When little Sally from the troop is selling 142 boxes, I suddenly check my phone's contact list to see who we can pay attention to next,” another mom wrote on PopSugar.
Scouting is a good cause of our generosity; My own way of coping is to bring five dollar bills to the girls outside the supermarket. I'll help the troops, but I won't help the scouts get axolotl socks.
Of course, selling cookies (although am I the only one whose Thin Mints don't taste the same anymore? Is it just age?). The public loves them; People go looking for Girl Scout cookies as soon as the season arrives. But let's stop pressuring girls to sell and pretending they're learning valuable, badge-worthy life skills. Instead, let's look for easy projects to financially support your troop in more meaningful and appropriate ways.
What I've long fantasized about is a different kind of fundraiser: one in which troops sign up for community service projects, like cleaning up the yards of elderly or disabled neighbors, picking up trash from the beach, and performing skits. to entertain the residents of a nursing home. They then hire good-hearted sponsors for every half hour of work they perform, at the rate those sponsors choose and can pay. There are no rewards except those of goodwill and giving to others.
You know, the Girl Scout stuff.
