For the last two years I have looked forward to cookie season with my Girl Scout. It's a chance for her to participate in valuable sales experience and a great time to connect with friends and family. It's a fun and yummy way for everyone to support the awesome ambitions and great opportunities the Girl Scouts offer our young daughters. In the next few weeks we will be making visits to our family & neighbors with our scout and, as parents, bringing the tempting order sheet to our workplaces. We fill, sort, deliver orders together as a family and our Girl Scout personally writes a thank you note to every person that orders. This experience offers great life lessons in sales, money managing, gratuity, and teamwork.
I agree that selling Girl Scout Cookies is an incredibly rewarding experience for a Girl Scout, but this week I see the "Cookie Culture" spiraling out of control. Many clubs and groups participate in sales endeavors to raise funds for their clubs, but I have never witnessed anything that has compared to this weeks fundraising frenzy. This week my Facebook news feed has been flooded with messages from parents staking their claim on potential Girl Scout cookie sales. Facebook posts soliciting sales, grappling for email addresses, and posting astronomically ambitions goals for their scout... and I get it. I haven't been immune to the hysteria and admit to a single post asking friends and family to let us know if we can stop by and see them. Today as more, and more, and more messages flood my news feed- I feel sad.
As a career marketing professional, I find it rewarding to teach our own Girl Scout about marketing, sales, and the power of social media and non-traditional means of connecting with your potential market. But, the tone of this cookie season is already taking a turn I won't be on the ride for. The entire sale is taking on a tone of the dozens of get rich quick, high pressure, copy/paste, generic, and disconnected multi-level marketing messages that blow up my private messenger and news feed everyday.... Girl Scout cookies are being peddled just the same as the latest multilevel marketing product and it makes me want to run from this cookie season faster than an old high school friend slyly adding me to their 'secret' inner circle sale group that's guaranteed to make me rich and reward me with huge hostess benefits.
I get it, though. The pressure of staking claim to potential clients, selling and meeting increasingly high troop goals (especially in our more rural areas) is a lot of pressure for the Girl Scouts and families who are already struggling to balance work, home, school, activities, sports, church, and dinner. Many troops, like our own, are small and can't afford to front the huge amount of cash to purchase stock and set up point-of-sale shops... and potentially be stuck paying for overstocked inventory of less popular flavors. The never ending news cycle of abductions and attacks on children have many families retreating from door-to-door sales to strangers and exclusively saving their direct sales activities for close family, friends, and coworkers. Turning to social media is a quick and easy audience.
The average sale season is less than a month. To achieve a "low" tier goal/prize level of 220 boxes each girl would need to sell at least 8 boxes every day of the month. Many troops only sell for 2 weeks- that means these girls need to sell 16 boxes every day to reach this "low" level... and at $4 a box that's managing $880.00... wow! When was the last time you handed your 9 year old almost a grand to manage? When you were 9, how many adults did you really know? Would netting a grand in cookie sales have been possible?
The Girl Scout "Cookie Culture" has become cult like (much to the delight of the entire Girl Scout organization), but between the memes about our young daughters being 'dealers' to the sliding scale of prizes and patches with promises of cumulative prize hauls for incremental levels achieved, to a virtual cookie group to track scouts progress along side their troop, and Scouts pressured to ask those who are on a diet to buy boxes to donate in lieu of purchasing a treat box- among many other selling 'tactics'... it's all just too much. The pressure to spare our daughters the disappointment of selling a measly 60 boxes (there are no prize levels below 60 boxes and a patch is only earned after selling at least 25 boxes) turns us to the largest group of people we know before sales even start in attempt to elbow our way into the market. The internet and social platforms have afforded us many advantages in direct sales, but we have to ask ourselves if there is meaningful lesson for our scouts beyond a few orders from social media connections?
I don't know how to counter this movement without feeling like I've let our girl scout down or offended almost every other cookie mom I know. We continuously hear murmurs of raising entitled generation of children- and instead of setting attainable goals- we are encouraged into exploiting our own relationships and social connections to pad cookie sales and produce windfall numbers. While, learning the power of online marketing and digital sales is incredibly meaningful, I hardly think mass canvasing the closest social media connections of parents on a digital platform is a meaningful life experience. In fact we can somewhat predict the outcomes of this trend when we look at the longevity of the actively employed sales force in multi-level marketing companies. Multi-level marketing models rely heavily on immediate gratification and reward, but provide little hope for long term return and personal fulfillment. How many social media 'friendships' will we as parents burn to sell cookies? How many people will begin to cringe when we announce cookie season is coming?
...I have a Girl Scout and due to the over saturation of sales pitches I am nearly burnt out on the season before it starts. I know there will be scouts in our community that will haul in cookie sales in the thousands through online connections and I hold no ill will for those scouts that find such huge success, kudos to you. I just wonder at what cost will this high pressure selling climate and social media sales be for the entire Girl Scout community and future selling seasons? 🍪