Girl Scout Cookies :: Why My Daughter Loves Selling Them
It’s Girl Scout Cookie season! Presales last through Feb 4th, and then you’ll find Girl Scout Cookies Booths popping up every weekend in March! You can find your closest cookie booths here! For many this brings great joy & so much nostalgia. For others, they avoid them like the plague. Despite your feelings, I’d love for you to remember these are young girls selling. Please avoid denying because of weight, or food guilt, or how they’ll go straight to your thighs. Remember these girls are in formative body image years and they don’t need the weight of adult’s body issues to complicate their already complex lives. Simply decline, or offer to donate to the military!
I now have 2 Girl Scouts selling cookies. One has been a Girl Scout for six years now (she’s a Cadette Girl Scout) and a new Scout on the block (she’s a Daisy Girl Scout). Me? I’m a veteran Girl Scout, having gone Daisy to Senior in my own day, and now serve as a Girl Scout Troop Leader. Girl Scouts is about SO much more than cookies — it’s just what we’re most known for to the average person! Girl Scouts is all about teaching girls to be leaders! 
As a Girl Scout Leader you constantly repeat, “Girl Led.” Our goal as leaders & volunteers is such that we are constantly teaching them that they are capable of doing and even leading the very event we’re doing. I started with Daisies (Kindergarten & First Grade) so the girls were limited in capabilities. Did that stop us from teaching them to lead? No way! We started with Kapers, small chores the girls do each meeting. Kapers during a meeting are things like: leading the pledge, leading the Girl Scout Pledge, passing out supplies, passing out snacks, etc. Then once our girls started selling Fall Product & Girl Scout Cookies they got to make decisions on how they were going to spend their proceeds. This is a vital part of Girl Scouting, your proceeds not only help fund your troop meetings, buying badges & patches, even providing snacks. The next step is using those funds to give back, we’re huge on Community Service Projects! Our girls have chosen to donate to a local animal shelter, foster care, and even a woman’s shelter. Other troops we know have painted garbage cans at a local park, planted flowers around community parks, and so much more!
My girls have learned so much from selling Girl Scout Cookies.
Selling cookies has boosted their self-confidence & people skills, particularly in speaking to adults. They can tell you exactly WHY they are selling cookies, what their troops are wanting to do with the proceeds and often then things they’ve already done. Girl Scouts has given my girls so many opportunities. My Cadette’s troop has funded countless camping trips (many that they planned), hiking, horse weekends, sleeping on the USS KIDD, touring & sleeping at a dolphin rescue center, spending the night at the BREC Baton Rouge Zoo, they’ve learned campfire cooking, planning events, touring the LPB Studios, touring Celtic Studios, first aide training, babysitter training, you see where I’m going here.
Not only has she had the privilege of all the experiences, she has gotten to do this along a group of Girl Scout sisters — forming bonds that will last for years. On top of that, they’ve funded most of these trips all on their own! They are currently planning, budgeting, goal setting for a bigger trip of white water rafting!
Which leads me to another great aspect of selling Girl Scout Cookies, the girls learn how to budget and set goals; money management. They can track previous years income, how far they stretched it. As they get older they literally plan their trips. Our girls have priced Air BNB’s, gas, groceries, and multiple white water rafting companies to see how much they really need to raise. They now pay close attention to our meeting crafts & how they can be reused in order to save even more money.
Not only are the girls making big decisions, they’re setting goals based on those decisions.
Girls set individual goals alongside their troop goals. Last year, my oldest really got bit by the bug! She made epic videos for me to post (as she doesn’t have a device or social media), but she knows I’ll only post when she asks. Some of her videos got as many as 3K views! She busted her tail selling to everyone we knew, taking advice on new locations to try, and attending every booth sale possible. She made it to 1,000 boxes. One thousand! She was so proud of herself! The best part? The girls were all really proud of each other!
They are introduced to business ethics, as Girl Scouts has some really great rules to keep the girls safe in every environment. Girl Scouts have been around since 1912 and they’ve spent years making sure they presented themselves with grace and confidence. Our girls know what is expected of them, they know where their money goes, they know the importance of handling money properly. We practice many things in preparation for sales, one of those is being honest with any money that changes hands. If someone gives us too much money? We don’t pocket it, we let them know. When cookies are donated, they get donated to exactly the places we decided & advertised. It’s a lot, but the girls know what’s happening and why. Girl led.
If you’d like to follow along with my girl’s sales, feel free to follow me on insta: @trixerelixer. They love making hilarious sales videos sandwiched between their goals and what Girl Scouts means to them!
That being said, remember to be nice to those girls! Support them or not, but be kind & uplifting. Don’t comment on your weight, just say “No thank you.” And maybe, just maybe, give them a smile as you pass their Girl Scout Cookie Booth!
