Thin Mints 2.0? Not So Fast
Every year as girl scout cookie season rolls around, I think back on my first forays into sales and the art of effectively hawking the mass-produced, yet deceptively delicious baked goods that have come to define many a girl’s early springtime. Standing before each foreboding doorstep, staring up at the closed door ahead and nervously gripping my clipboard and ballpoint pen, I remember being filled with a distinct sense of fear crossed with nervous excitement — who would be waiting on the other side? Would they be nice, rude or indifferent, and most importantly, would they buy?
It has now been over a decade (wow) since I (not so begrudgingly) abandoned my Girl Scout sash, but it’s amazing to see, for better or worse, how little the cookie sales program has changed. In this week’s Newsweek, reporter Kurt Soller writes on the issue, highlighting the program’s resistance to even a gradual shift towards E-commerce and larger seeming opposition to technology in general.
Soller mentions the story of 8-year-old Wild Freeborn, whose tech-savvy father created a YouTube video of Wild in her Girl Scout outfit repeating the oft-used sales pitch: “Buy cookies! And they’re yummy!” While simple, the video proved effective, generating more than 700 orders in two weeks.
However, Wild’s seemingly innocent plea was not met with friendly high-fives from other parents (jealous, perhaps?) or local Girl Scout officials. Freeborn was instructed to take down the site and questions were routed back to the organization’s FAQ, which stated, “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.”
Yet it doesn’t seem like safety could possibly be the issue here. Perhaps I have become a little too ensconced in the Web world, but I can’t see how selling cookies online could be markedly more dangerous than sending young girls wandering door-to-door? I understand the organization’s wariness and the fact that standards and rules must be clearly established before a formal E-commerce strategy is initiated — yet, it seems the organization is already (at least) a few years behind the times.
It’s 2009 — and adolescents live on the Web. If the Girl Scout organization doesn’t wise up and find a way to appropriately evolve and acknowledge this fact, both the cookie program and perhaps even the organization as a whole may risk becoming irrelevant.
I don’t mean to say that Girl Scouts should stop selling cookies on street corners, but why should technology be shut out? I know I’m not the only one hoping to be able to buy my annual box of Peanut Butter Patties for years to come — so let’s give three cheers for little Wild and here’s to hoping that soon the rest of the organization follows suit.