Girl Scouts, Not Their Parents, Should Sell The Cookies

Parents may mean well by passing the sign-up sheet around the office and posting about their child's cookie sales on social media, but there's one big reason why Girl Scout Cookies should ultimately be sold by the girls and not by the parents.

We've waited long enough!

It will soon be Girl Scout cookie season in Boise with the first day of sales coming up this Friday, January 11th.  We'll have plenty of opportunities over the next few weeks to stock up on Tagalongs, S'Mores, and loads of Thin Mints to stick in the freezer. Our local Girls Scouts of Silver Sage Council says pre-sales will run from January 11th through January 27th, and booth sales run from February 22nd through March 17th.

Troop leaders in the Treasure Valley and across the country are hoping it's the scouts who are selling the goods this year and not their parents. Girls can sell cookies in person and also online by sending out email links to family and friends through a Digital Cookie Platform.  But some parents take it a step further by selling them for their kids on social media.

Girl Scout leaders say when the parents take over the process it defeats the purpose.  Girls learn five main skills when they sell cookies, and if parents are selling the cookies for them, they aren’t learning those skills.

I sold Girl Scout cookies as a kid and my mom would drive me around to houses that she knew would probably show me some success, but I still had to get out of the car and do the work. I was a pretty shy kid, and I remember how awesome it felt to get a yes, and write down the number of boxes on the order form and keep a running total.  Little bits of confidence started brewing.  I hope the girls selling them now can experience the same thing.

For those of us who love Girl Scout cookies and just want to eat tons of them, we might not be thinking about using the ordering process to help the girls learn a life skill.  When we see an order form we're going for it with a one-track mind that's on Do-si-Dos.  But maybe we should kindly ask if we can order directly from the scout instead of on the parent's social media page, and then it becomes more of a win-win situation.

And about those five skills, they are goal-setting, decision-making, money management, people skills, and business ethics.

We'll be watching for you over the next few weeks, girls.  Good luck!  And thanks for making the cookies small so we can eat double.