In the old days, Girl Scouts used to load their cookies on little red wagons or carry them in their arms as they trudged from door to door to sell them.
Now they`re more likely to set up card tables outside a supermarket on a Saturday morning or a train station during rush hour. And because of greater involvement by parents, the people pushing the chocolate Thin Mints and shortbread Trefoils are just as likely to be 40-plus as Brownie age.
Girls who don`t sell on the streets often stay home working the phones in elaborate telemarketing campaigns. Trained in understanding prospect lists and residual markets, the youngsters are taught to read from prepared scripts and to have politely worded follow-up responses ready for those who decline to place orders.
Girl Scout cookie sales have grown up.
”Lifestyles have changed. Mothers are working, and after dark it`s not safe for little girls to be up and down the streets,” said Pat Dyer, director of public relations and marketing for the Girl Scouts of Greater Philadelphia. ”The door-to-door aspect of selling is no longer the main way to sell. Nobody is home in the afternoon anymore. More and more sales are done at booths or by calling people.”
According to Dyer, more parents are selling for their children, taking cookies to work and plying them to their co-workers.
”My daughter went out on the streets and delivered them herself and sold them,” she said. ”Very few girls go out without their parents today.”
Cookie sales are big business. Prospective cookie-pushers often undergo sales training at troop meetings and at annual cookie pep rallies, where they play Trivial Pursuit-style games to test their sales acumen and product knowledge.
For example, they are asked, ”Which cookies have the least calories?”
Answer: Trefoils, at 30 calories. Or, ”Are the cookies kosher?” Answer: Yes, all of them.
Each scout gets a uniform patch for selling cookies, and one point for each 50 boxes sold. At the end of the selling season, they trade in their points for prizes: T-shirts, insulated mugs, Girl Scout shoelaces, memo books or wristlets with compartments for carrying things.
Dyer said the first commercial Girl Scout cookie sale took place in Philadelphia almost 60 years ago, when local scouts were demonstrating how to operate new-fangled gas ovens in the window of the Philadelphia Gas Works. The scouts would bake cookies and give them to passersby. One day, someone remarked, ”You should be selling those,” and thus was the annual cookie sale born.
In 1934, the cookies went commercial when the local council hired Keebler Baking Co. to bake shortbread cookies in the shape of trefoils, the official Girl Scout emblem. Two years later, the practice was picked up nationwide.
This year, scouts are selling seven varieties, including Thin Mints, the overwhelming favorite, accounting for 25 percent of all cookie sales.
The cookies are manufactured by Little Brownie Baker, which is based in Louisville. Little Brownie is one of two bakers the scout`s national headquarters authorized to bake the cookies. The bakers make presentations to each area council`s cookie committees, which decide which company will be the supplier.
Sales are easy, according to scouting literature. Scouts claim that 90 percent of all people approached buy the cookies.
”They`re buying memories mostly, good feelings, patriotism,” Dyer said, adding that she was off to pick up more cookies. ”We`re out of cookies down at Girl Scout headquarters.”
