When 8-year-old Asheville, North Carolina girl Wild Freeborn enlisted her dad's help to set up a cookie-selling website, all she wanted to do was hawk enough Thin Mints and Peanut Butter Patties to earn her troop a trip to summer camp. Sounds smart, right? After all, any savvy entrepreneur needs a website.
At first, Freeborn's strategy worked, reports Newsweek: She sold more than 700 boxes of cookies to local residents through the online form, delivering every box herself.
But some parents got mad, citing unfair advantage, and Girl Scout officials quickly demanded that Wildborn take the website down, pointing to the Girl Scouts of America's longstanding ban on online sales. "The safety of our girls is always our chief concern. Girl Scout Cookie activities are designed to be face-to-face learning experiences for the girls," says the Girl Scout website.
Many people see this ban as silly and archaic, since the point of selling Girl Scout cookies is to raise money and teach entrepreneurship to young girls. And the future of entrepreneurship is certainly in online marketing, not going door-to-door Avon Lady-style. I say the Girl Scouts should get with the times and not punish girls for using their smarts and taking advantage of their resources.
What do you think - should the Girl Scouts ban online cookie sales?
3-12-2009 @3:22PM Colin said... How absurd! Let them sell them however they like.
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3-12-2009 @3:31PM Vanessa said... Absurd... and how is it safer for girls to go knocking on strangers' doors than to sell cookies online?
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3-12-2009 @3:38PM kgb1001001 said... There is a fairness issue here -- often it would be the parents creating the website rather than the child, and that gets into the whole "parents selling cookies" issue. A better solution (and one the Boy Scouts use -- or actually Trails End does in their website) is to allow each scout to sell online through a single group web site site -- each scout has a unique ID that credits the sales to them.
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3-12-2009 @3:37PM Michelle said... Yes selling GS cookies online was a great idea for that little girl. But remember she is not the only one selling cookies in that area, she is not the only one trying to raise money for her respective troop. If cookie sales are done online what is to stop it from getting monopolized by a small group of individuals severely limiting or at least over shadowing any sales made by other girls.
Though I suppose it falls into the same category as all the girls who have their parents take the cookie sale to work. The girls are not learning how to sell merely pushing it off onto their parents. Now it has been pushed off onto a website made by dad.
Maybe it would be more appropriate if the troop as a group learned how to make a website and made it together, that sounds more like a what a Girl Scout should do.
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3-12-2009 @3:37PM Astin said... Yah, just what we need, competing MySpace and Facebook pages for each girl scout in the area!
Actually, I think going online only makes sense, especially since those kids today are all about the Internets and Googles and whathaveyou.
In fact, Girl Scouts should centralize the whole thing like charities do for pledge drives. The girls can set up a page, send a link to everyone, and then personally deliver them.
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3-12-2009 @3:39PM Cliff said... My wife being a Girl Scout troop leader, and myself being a web designer, this topic has come up about, oh, ten times in the past two months. So, please pardon my run-on comment.
I fully believe this is a case of GS being a lot like the recording industry in recent history. They just aren't keeping up with the times, so they reject everything.
I personally think GS should have one central website that takes all cookie orders. This way people without a Girl Scout in the area (trust me, people have been hunting down my daughter like she's a crack dealer) can get cookies, and maybe even extend the sales period more than a few months in the winter.
The problem with a central sales site is that the local troops currently get profits from what they sell. So my solution; they set it up where each troop has "territory", so when someone in that area orders, the nearest troop gets a cut.
There are currently personal "rewards" for girls that get a certain number of boxes sold, but I personally think it's a little distasteful ("Okay, Susie, get out there and sell sell sell so we can go on a camping trip this year.") and would rather see a troop-wide reward anyway.
And as far as promoting person to person salesmanship, since each troop would still have a vested interest in seeing sales in their area going up, they could have the option of going door to door with a "please visit this site to place your order" flier. And if the person doesn't have internet access, orders could still be taken the "old-fashioned" way.
I think I'd prefer this over my 7 year old bundling up in 15 degree weather to sell cookies door to door, working on her sales pitch.
Okay, done, had that bottled up since I found out I couldn't set up a site for my daughter to sell cookies on... sorry for the rant. :)
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3-12-2009 @3:52PM Teresa Olson said... I haven't seen a door to door cookie/candy or anything in years. Going door to door is discouraged as unsafe. You see them outside the stores and banks. I find the presale offensive while other groups are still stilling.
Besides, the scouts get the money what are they complaining about.
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3-12-2009 @4:17PM Wendie said... Not once in 25 years has a girl scout come to my door selling cookies. Co-workers sell them at work for their kids on occasion. On-line sales is the way to go. It's too dangerous for the kids to go door to door without an adult chaperone for safety purposes.
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3-12-2009 @4:24PM Monika said... This is silly.
If she's hand-delivering them, she's already doing more than any of those bring-to-work girls. And as a huge added bonus, she's delivering a service without pestering the populace. I hate people ringing my bell or calling while I'm trying to make dinner, or the kids that stop me on the street and try to pressure me into buying their candies.
As for safety ... I've never heard anything as ridiculous as safety being synonymous with meeting strangers door to door. In fact, that's a big reason I was never a door-to-door cookie seller when I was in the scouts. The thought of going to some stranger's house and trying to make them buy my cookies creeped me out.
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3-12-2009 @4:33PM sffdfd said... just to let you know, girl scouts are only supposed to sell door to door to people they know. if you have a girl scout selling cookies to you at your house and you dont know them, you report to the girl scout board right away!
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3-12-2009 @4:41PM ericamklein said... Typical... someone does something creative and thoughtful that legitimately gets them ahead of the curve, and those left behind scream and wail that its unfair for anyone to be BETTER than they are. Utterly ridiculous. Let the girl keep her website and her sales, she earned them by thinking outside the box.
Here's a thought - how about encouraging these other parents who were so upset to help their children learn about technology and internet safety so that they CAN use it safely. That way everyone will benefit.
Stuff like this is jsut really upsetting.
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3-12-2009 @4:39PM Samme said... Every girl scout I see now seems to be between 5 and maybe 8 or 9. I haven't seen any older girls in a long time, and talking to a friend confirmed that nearly all of them quit before middle school.
So much for leadership from older girls to the younger girls. I kind of thought that was one of the main points of scouting.
What happened? Is the pressure to sell cookies driving them out? Or is scouting due for a serious updating. This report suggests the latter.
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3-12-2009 @4:48PM Dan said... Amazing! This is supposed to be about these girls raising funds to go to camp. It's not about a competition! Damn! I'm so tired of these organizations showing such discrimination! If you are going to start limiting their ability to do this, then it's time to abolish all of these organizations. I'm tired of the discrimination! It's time it stopped! Abolish these organizations if you can't be supportive of a child coming up with an idea that succeeds! Shame on you adults that have put a stop to this child's ability to be successful! Shame on you!
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3-12-2009 @5:02PM Dawn said... I was a Girl Scout from 3rd grade until I graduated high school a few years back, and even though I'm all for the internet, and believe thinking outside the box is great, I do not approve of this.
Girl Scouts are not allowed to take cookie sales until a specific day of the year, and I remember waking up at 8am on the first day of sales (a Saturday) and walking around for 7 to 8 hours a day every weekend, with my parents waiting at the sidewalk like they did on Halloween. That is how you sell girl scout cookies. Maybe I'm being old school, but my parents never sold my cookies at work for me, and I don't approve of that either. I loved the personal rewards, because it gave me a personal insentive to work harder than the other girls. I still attribut my work ethic (in part at least) to being a scout.
I don't know, but I don't really like the idea that this girl is just sitting at home and taking sales away from other girls. When I was in middle school, I busted my @$$ for weeks in order to sell enough boxes to swim with the dolphins at Sea World, which was the top prize that year. I think that girls should have to work for their prizes, but again, maybe that's just me.
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3-12-2009 @7:11PM Barack Obama said... I have Girl Scout sisters and while I personally think that the way to teach responsibility and hard work is to deliver them by hand, I don't see anything wrong with using creativity; that's also a vital skill for an entrepreneur.
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3-12-2009 @5:53PM am said... i would totally buy them online...all year round too...i could not find one freaking girl scout this year and got no cookies:(
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3-12-2009 @6:26PM Amber said... Well, she would most certainly be bringing cookies to strangers who bought them online from her. How else would they have been delivered? Sent through the mail with a nice hefty postage charge tacked onto the cookie price?
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3-12-2009 @7:16PM Scoobie-Doobie-Doo said... How is online sales a fairness issue when pushing the parents to sell at work has been pushed forever?
I don't want a 7 yo to have a "sales pitch." Scouts never led anyone to a Fortune 500 job, so let's stop pretending this is important.
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3-12-2009 @8:47PM michele said... i have never been approached by a girl scout with a cookie sales form. it's always been the moms doing the selling in my experience--and the deliveries! maybe the scouts in question have sorted the orders or something, but i've never known one to be involved in the cookie-selling-experience. and i'd much rather buy from a forward-thinking young lady schilling cookies over the internet, even if she did need parental help setting it up, than the kid whose mom is doing all the work.
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3-13-2009 @12:13AM Sam said... Been a Girl Scout since I was 7 years old and out in freezing weather trying to sell cookies to the neighbors. I've been a troop leader (from Brownies to Seniors), a Trainer and other assorted jobs.
The real big beef -- things such as "eBay" (and similar sites) sales. Here you have folks buying cases during the normal sales period and then months later selling the boxes (marked-up from the purchase price). No one knows how they were stored, under what conditions or exactly HOW OLD are the boxes of cookies.
It's one thing when I buy a case (12 boxes) and then freeze them. Another to trust a stranger that has a profit motive to sell them to me.
That's why folks at the present moment, GSUSA DO NOT ALLOW internet sales.
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