Dozens of young entrepeneurs soon will begin knocking on doors around Litchfield and surrounding area, armed with the sweetest product available.
Yep, it’s Girl Scout cookie time.
“It is our biggest time of year,” Niki Settergren, the community cookie manager for Litchfield Girl Scout troops said. “There’s a lot of excitement around it.”
Cookie sales became a Girl Scout hallmark in 1917, just five years after Juliette Gordon Low founded Girl Scouts in the United States, according to the organization’s history. The Mistletoe Troop of Muskogee, Oklahoma, baked cookies and sold them in its high school cafeteria as a service project.
Ever since, cookie sales have been used to raise funds to pay for various Girl Scout troop activities.
Of course, the sale has grown a bit from that first effort, with approximately 200 million boxes of cookies sold nationwide annually.
But before Girl Scouts hit the street with their treasure trove of treats, they must learn the basics, and that means practicing their sales pitch and taste-testing each of the cookies.
That’s what brought more than 30 girls and their parents to the Meeker Cooperative community room Saturday morning. A training session led by two cookie sales experts from the Lakes and Pines Council offered sales tips to the girls, who role-played the sales process, tested cookies and wrapped up the session with a game of charades.
“Why do we do the cookie tasting?” a leader asked the girls, then explained “So when someone asks, ‘Is the lemon cookie really lemony?’ you can tell them.”
The girls took this tip to heart, enthusiastically sampling each of the nine cookie varieties when given the opportunity. Their sampling included a scoresheet with pictures of each cookie and room to write a one-word description of each. At the bottom of their sheet, the girls also were asked to identify their favorite cookie.
To no one’s surprise, Thin Mints and Carmel deLites scored near the top, but Lemonades and S’mores also garnered some support — as did “all of them.”
Settergren has two daughters in Girl Scouts, and both will participate in cookie sales this year. She was a Girl Scout herself, and initially said that not much has changed in the selling process. But as she talked, some changes became obvious.
“I think it’s harder (to sell), because the cookies have gotten more expensive,” Settergren said. “At least I feel like it was easier when I was a Girl Scout, but maybe that’s because I was younger and didn’t realize it.”
Cookies have increased in price — to $4.50 a box this year, up from $4 in 2019 — but they remain as popular as ever.
With 38 Girl Scouts selling last year, the local troops sold more than 11,000 boxes of cookies. Though the troops’ cookie managers like Settergren do their best to replenish the cookie inventory weekly, they encounter inevitable shortages.
“Last year, the whole council was out of Carmel deLites,” Settergren said. “It seems like we’re always short of something. People really like their Girl Scout cookies.”
That’s a good thing, because even though local Girl Scouts do another small fundraiser in the fall, cookie sales fund most activities for the year, like day camps and other outings, as well as supplies like uniforms and gear.
“It’s all up to the girls,” XXXXXXXX said. “It’s their money, and they get to decide, as a troop, how they want to use it.”
