By Anjali Kishore
Never fear cookie lovers, it’s that time of year again – Girl Scout Cookies are making their long-awaited reappearance! It’s hard to deny the cult status that Girl Scout Cookies have reached; they’re swirled into Dunkin coffee concoctions, crumbled into ice cream Blizzards, and any grocery store you go to is more than likely to have some imitation of the famed Thin Mints or Samoas perched on a shelf. This is especially true for Greenwich, where late winter brings on blooms of cookie stands on street corners, sidewalks, and in school courtyards.
As one of the more active Girl Scout networks throughout the state, Greenwich’s Girl Scout scene is particularly vibrant; town Cookie Manager and Leader of Girl Scout Troop #50209 Nicole Ehret was somewhat ambivalent about Girl Scouts before her now 4th grade daughter joined the troop in kindergarten. But once she saw the positive impact being a part of Girl Scouts was having on her daughter, and the community they were able to build through scouting, she was eager to get involved: “It started as a ‘no way, I’m not going to do this’, but once I realized what it was about, I realized it was a nice mission and program for girls.” The Girl Scout’s impact on her daughter and other troop members was two-fold: not only does scouting serve as an important social outlet for girls, but also as a platform where they can learn essential life and business skills. As CEO of Girl Scouts of Connecticut Diana Mahoney put it, “It’s not surprising that 80% of female entrepreneurs were once Girl Scouts. Having the opportunity to run their very own cookie business gives them essential tools to achieve their dreams today and in the future.”
Some of these skills include the five fundamental goals of the cookie program: goal setting, decision making, business ethics, people skills and money management. Ehret has seen growth in her daughter and fellow troop members when it comes to money management and people skills in particular, saying “When my daughter was a Daisy, she barely spoke to a customer, and at the cookie booths they’d kind of just stand there. As they got older, they became more confident, where they were the ones leading the cookie booth. Now, the girls selling cookies are the ones calling friends, knocking on the door, they’re the ones getting their site up and running. You can see the growth from kindergarten to now and they’re understanding the concept of the program. When they were in kindergarten, they couldn’t even make change; now, they’re the ones handling the money and taking on the whole cookie booths. You definitely see them maturing and understanding the business from the financial part to the selling, realizing what inventory was and learning a bunch of skills throughout the program.”
Of course, being a Girl Scout in times such as these has thrown a new bundle of challenges at the girls, especially considering their role as proprietors of food, and their business model, which leans heavily on person-to-person interactions. Much of the ethos of Girl Scouts, and part of the charm of buying the cookies themselves, comes from the interactions that community members have with the young budding entrepreneurs, and in COVID times it’s proven challenging to carry forward that spirit. However, Ehret says, this just offers another opportunity for growth, building on the predetermined values of scouting: “Last year, it was tough to sell cookies at first. I had to sit down with my daughter and we had to figure out how we were going to do this: people didn’t want us to go door to door, so we really had to think out of the box. It taught her that the original way of doing things doesn’t always work, and sometimes they need to change the way they think.” As important as the specific values that scouts learn through cookie selling are, perhaps the real gem of the program is how it hones the Girl Scouts’ ability to adapt to unforeseen situations and think creatively, whether the situation is something as mundane as a slammed door, or figuring out where to place a cookie booth for the best business; or something as grand in scale as a worldwide pandemic stymying the troops’ ability to follow the guidebook and sell cookies the traditional way.
But to view Girl Scouts as simply a businesswoman incubator would be wrong, and simplistic; after all, they’re still young girls, and girls just want to have fun. Ehret was particularly pleased with the social aspect of scouting, saying, “I saw that my daughter met new friends, girls from other schools that she normally wouldn’t have been friends with if it wasn’t for scouting. Even now, we meet once a month and she gets so excited to see the girls that don’t go to her school. Seeing them get brought together was nice.”
This social outlet was particularly important during the pandemic, when many young kids struggled not being able to go to school and see their friends on a regular basis. For Ehret and her daughter’s troop, who continued to meet outside and masked essentially through the whole pandemic experience, scouting was a social lifeline for kids who were lost without the structure of having a class to see everyday. “When the pandemic happened, we had one Zoom meeting and realized, oh my gosh this is not good for us,” she explains, “It wasn’t working, so we have consistently met outside in the freezing cold for basically this whole pandemic. We meet once a month so they know that that month, they’re going to be able to see someone in person; it was helpful, because my daughter struggled not being able to go to school.” Older kids and adults who can fend for themselves socially were able to develop their own social outlets, but for younger kids whose lives revolve around playdates, sports, and school, isolation is a particularly tricky beast, and one that scouting offered a respite from.
This year, the Girl Scouts are doing their best to go about business as usual, employing door hangers with cookie links and online cookie portals, as well as offering customers a chance to get the real Girl-Scout-Cookie-buying experience. Not to mention, a new cookie is on its way! Adventurefuls are a brownie cookie, topped with caramel cream and festooned with chocolate drizzle and sea salt. According to Ehret, the cookies are real-life Girl Scout approved, which is good enough for us – after all, kids know cookies better than pretty much anyone.
For those interested in purchasing cookies, reach out to a Girl Scout or Troop leader you may know to get a sense of their cookie-selling game plan this year, or visit http://gsofct.org/.
