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What do Girl Scouts learn from selling cookies?
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It's Girl Scout cookie season and you know what that means: Swaths of girls and parents hawking Thin Mints and Do-Si-Dos in supermarket parking lots, door-to-door, and in workplaces and offices across the country.
But what lessons are these girls learning from this venerable cookie selling tradition? Marketplace Money Senior Producer Paddy Hirsch asked that question in this interview.
"I'm told that this Girl Scout cookie experience is supposed to be educational in terms of business and economics," he said. "But I just don't see it."
Turns out, there are lessons to learn. We hear from two Los Angeles Scouts who note that selling cookies "helps us with our social skills... and counting money and things like that." And "we're learning to be more polite... and saying 'thank you.'"
The annual event also teaches skills for getting ahead in life and work, according to one mom we asked: "The girls are more assertive, they're confident, and those are life skills for everyone - especially women - to be successful."
Listen to the full interview in the audio player above.
I bought cookies tonight from two 9 ish yr old scouts who were making up songs about the cookies at their booth outside of a local grocery store. The moms with them had the girls handle the transaction and prompted them in how to make the correct change. This is what the cookie sales should be. I did not buy from a booth I passed over the weekend as the girls were being a bit 'pushy" about asking people to buy cookies as they went into the store instead of offering cookies as people left the store.
My daughter holds a central Texas regional record for sales in one season; 238 cases (not boxes). I like to think that the cookie sales made her goal-oriented, but she probably was anyway; cookie sales were just a demonstration of a personality trait.
These days I try to educate the girls on effective (ie., hard) sell techniques.
Don't phrase your questions so that the customer has a chance to say 'No'. Tell them what you're doing and what you want.
"I'm selling Girl Scout cookies and I want you to buy a box" is more effective than "Would you like to buy some Girl Scout Cookies?".
Always try to upsell. If they pick out two boxes at $3.50 and offer a $10, say "You know, for only fifty cents more you can get that third box".
Even to this day, when I see my daughter coming my way, I reach around to protect my wallet.
I sold Girl Scout cookies with my sister in the early 1960s door-to-door with no adult helping us. When we were just a few years younger, our mother did not allow us to walk around the block without her, so walking by ourselves to neighbors we had never met on a street other than our own felt like a possible Nancy Drew adventure. We held hands to calm our nerves and often stood for many minutes on the sidewalk afraid to walk up and knock on a stranger's door. But we overcame those fears and knocked and were thrilled when we succeeded in exchanging a box cookies for 50 cents. Once, an elderly man opened his door, listened to our sales pitch, walked into the darkened recesses of his house for a few minutes, returned with 50 cents, took the box of cookies, looked inquiringly at the box for some time, and then gave the cookies back to us! We tried to give him his money back. He wouldn't take his money and he didn't want the cookies. So there we were with a box of cookies AND the 50 cents. Quite a moral dilemma. We decided the cookies were ours & sat behind the neighbors' garage and promptly ate the entire box right then and there!
I too sold the GS cookies in the 70's with no adult supervision, but reluctantly because the cookies didn't have healthy ingredients, which may be what caused the gentleman to give you the box of cookies he'd just bought. Recently I was politely solicited by a young GS in a convenience store, so I read the ingredients list on the back of every kind of cookie they had, and was horrified to discover that in the intervening 30 years they've still not managed to come up with one variety that isn't bad for you to eat. Now that was a learning experience for both the girls and their moms. I considered the gentlemen's solution, but decided I didn't want to reward the incompetent company that makes the GS junk food, and couldn't feel good about giving already chubby girls that much saturated fats to eat, so I didn't buy. GS of America needs to put into their next contract the obligation to make one healthy variety of cookie, then they could create a badge for the girls to invent a healthy cookie recipe and have a contest for which healthy recipe would be the one mass-produced. That would be a real business learning experience for young GS and their parents.
