I have just got word from my wife and Shortie that she is getting real close on her goal of selling 1,000 boxes of Girl Scout Cookies. When they did the final tally from the cookie booth they worked on Thursday evening the 38 eight boxes she was credited with selling put Shortie at 932 boxes sold for the season thus far.
The weather has really cooperated this week, it didn’t look promising last week in the 10 day forecast, but a high pressure system has parked over Texas this week and each day has been gorgeous. This is the last week for Girl Scout Cookie sales in our area, the official closing time is 8:00 PM on Sunday evening. I think the “cookie gods” just might have been looking out for Shortie, because we are supposed to have some heavy rains moving in late Sunday night and continuing with heavy rain through Wednesday of next week.
As it stands right now Shortie needs 68 more boxes sold to reach her goal and she has enough cookie booths scheduled to make it unless something absolutely unexpected happens. The booth sales on the last weekend generally tend to do well as people will stock up knowing that it will be another 10 months before they purchase any more.
I don’t know that we could have survived this cookie season if our older daughter had decided that she wanted to try and make the 1,000 box club. Luckily Blondie has had her fill of selling cookies, she is in her eighth year of scouts and as the girls get older it becomes harder to sell them, people seem to purchase more willingly from the little ones than the teenagers.
Last year Shortie was the top seller in her little troop of nine girls, she also was tenth in the entire area that has over 3,000 girls in this geographic location. The only thing that we didn’t know was that she was about 30 boxes from making it into the 1,000 box club in 2017. So this year it has been kept track of by my wife as to the amounts Shortie has been selling, the lady who is charge of cookies for the troop never told her last year how close she was to 1,000 mark and we weren’t keeping track either.
Shortie finishing tenth last year for the entire area was a complete surprise for sure, she got a trophy and a nice paper certificate of achievement at the annual awards ceremony so that was nice; but she has, since that day last year at the awards ceremony, been focused on the 1,000 box club.
Personally I believe that the Girls Scouts were a great idea back in the day when the group was formed. But just like any good thing it can and will be exploited if the people in charge aren’t just absolute saints. We, as a family, have been involved now for eight years. I have seen some things that just don’t sit well with me on how this organization is run.
Girl Scouts of America is a 501-C3 charitable organization as far as the IRS is concerned, which means they are tax exempt. I don’t have a problem with that, I will tell you some of the things I do take issue with.
Savannah, Georgia is the birth place of Girl Scouts and it would make sense to me to have the organization’s headquarters location in the city it was founded. The people running Girl Scouts think differently and so the headquarters is located in New York City on Fifth Avenue. I’m not a financial genius by any stretch of the imagination but I can damn sure tell you that office space on Fifth Avenue is a hell of lot more expensive than it is in Savannah, my guess would be at least 100 times more expensive if not more. So just why do they need that New York address?
Another thing that bothers me is that the organization seems to think that they can’t survive on just cookie sales alone, did you know that Girls Scouts also do a fall product sale? Maybe if they weren’t on Fifth Ave. the cookie sales might be enough and the girls could actually be doing something they enjoy in the fall instead of selling products.
Another thing that seems a little ridiculous is how the girls are rewarded for the cookie sales. There is little “trinket” type “rewards” for certain levels of cookie sales achieved. These products don’t amount to a whole hell of lot in cost because it is all just cheaply made Chinese products that just about fall apart if you look at it wrong. The mistake that is being made by the “leaders” is that a girl can only receive one reward. So if the little purse a girl would get as a reward for example for 250 boxes sold is what she wants, the girls will stop selling when she reaches 250 boxes. She may have the ability to sell 2 or 3 times that 250 box amount but if those prizes don’t appeal to her she’s finished at 250 to get the purse.
As cheap as these things are let the girls get the trinket for each level they reach instead of limiting it to one, or at least let them pick from the gifts that they had surpassed along the way. Sales would surely go up if they would just do the last thing I mentioned.
The $0.60 a box that the troop receives seems to be a little weak as far as the commission structure goes. It doesn’t matter if the troop sells one case of cookies or ten semi trailer loads of cookies; it is still 60 cents a box. It would seem to me that there is some room for improvement in this area. Pre-order cookies might carry a higher commission by a nickel or so, that way the initial order from the bakery could be larger and allow a better price negotiation position.
Shortie, if she makes her goal, will generate $600 in revenue for her troop. The Girl Scout rules don’t allow for individual distribution or use of the funds, so all the girls will benefit equally even though some will only sell 50 or 75 boxes of cookies, talk about redistribution of wealth. No wonder so many youngsters think socialism is a good thing, they are being taught it in scouting of all places.
The other thing that is a bone of contention between me and these leaders of Girl Scouts is the membership dues. I don’t have a problem with the girls having to pay a membership fee. I do see a problem with the organization charging the volunteers who donate their time and vehicles to the organization having to pay a membership fee. My oldest daughter’s troop leader has been a troop leader for 40 years and each year she has to pay her dues, she doesn’t even have a daughter in the troop, and her granddaughter that was in the troop moved out of state two years ago. This lady is committed though to keeping their troop together and helping each of these girls earns their gold award. It just doesn’t seem right to me to charge the volunteers a fee, and if so, make them exempt at some point. Five years would be plenty enough time to weed out the ones just looking for a free ride.
Four years ago Shortie’s troop had their “cookie mom” end up running off to California with the troop funds from the cookie sales. The next year in California she did the same thing to the troop there, and ended up back in Texas. The Girl Scouts would not press charges or even allow the troop leaders discuss what had happened with the parents. They didn’t want the Girl Scout organization to get a bad name for prosecuting a thief, they said people would not want to volunteer to run the troop cookie sales if they thought they might be prosecuted if money ended up missing.
Well the thieves know this and they will rob these kids blind if given the chance, believe it or not the lady actually ended up with another troop back here in Texas and stole money again. This time though she didn’t get away with it; one of the girls in the troop happened to be the daughter of an assistant county prosecutor. Her office didn’t prosecute the case but she got the federal government involved and the feds did. With the help of Shortie’s troop, the local council and the California troop they were able to assemble enough evidence and the pattern used; that she was charged with grand theft, interstate transportation of stolen property, wire fraud and some other minor charges. She was convicted last year and sentenced to eight years in prison plus fines and ordered to pay restitution. I doubt that the restitution will ever take place, but she is in prison where she belongs.
But if the Girl Scouts organization would have had their way they would have turned a blind eye to her antics again. Those girls work way to hard selling cookies to be ripped off by a thief. It is amazing to me that Girl Scouts as a national organization doesn’t at least have some internal list that they would keep that would keep someone like this from being able to do it more than once.
I guess I have complained enough for one daily dose on the Girl Scouts so I’ll just end it right now. Over all it is a good organization, I just think it has gotten to be more about the money than the girls.
Until next time,
