Smart Cookies

Today kicks off the annual Girl Scout cookie sale.  And for the first time in my life, I get to participate!!  Of course, I’ll be helping Crisana sell, but we all know it’s a lifelong dream fulfilled for me.  Too bad they don’t make those cute little Brownie uniforms in adult sizes, ya know?

In honor of the occasion, I present the following little-known facts about Girl Scout cookies, compliments of my favorite book of reference: the veritable Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, 4th Edition.

Founding Mothers.  After Juliette Low founded the Girl Scouts in 1912, the local troops raised money by selling knitted clothes, baked goods and chickens.  Then in 1934, Philadelphia press agent Bella Spewak (who later wrote Kiss Me Kate) came up with an idea she thought would make fund-raising easier: a vanilla cookie in the shape of the Girl Scout seal.  She contracted with a local bakery to make them.  One day she heard that reporters were going to interview actresses at a local flower show.  Figuring her Girl Scout troop would get free publicity if they showed up selling cookies, she sent a contingent of green-clad cookie-mongers.  They got so much publicity and sold so many cookies that within three years, more than a hundred local councils were selling the same professionally-baked cookies.  It was the beginning of an American institution.

Now It’s Big Business

• In 1990 the Girl Scouts sold 130 million boxes of cookies, grossing $225 million.  That’s 13 cookies for every person in the U.S.  Average sale per scout?  About 100 boxes.
• Some troops now offer “cookie seminars” and toll-free ordering numbers to boost sales.  When asked about nutritional value, scouts are coached to respond: “Our cookies contain no preservatives and no artificial colors, and are made of 100% vegetable shortening.”
• The Girl Scout Manual offers sales tips like this: “Your words and tone of voice must generate the image of someone people trust.”
• The greatest cookie seller of all time was Markita Andrews, who sold 60,000 boxes in her twelve years of Girl Scouting.  She was so successful that she was hired to make motivational speeches to big companies and appear in a 12-minute sales motivational film, The Cookie Kid, produced by Disney.
• Most popular cookies: Thin Mint, followed by Shortbread and Peanut-Butter Sandwiches.  Least popular: cheese-flavored crackers.

There you have it.  Now you know.  And knowledge, as they say, is power.