Girl Scout Troop 46293 from Falcon, Colorado, which includes both Daisies and Brownies, have begun their traditional cookie-selling season. According to the Girl Scouts website, the tradition started in 1917 when the Mistletoe Troop of Muskogee, Oklahoma, began baking cookies and selling them in the local high school cafeteria.Troop 46293ís ìCookie Mom,î Michelle Arcara, said she was in Girl Scouts as a child and knew the benefits her daughter would receive from being part of the organization. ìI have seen her confidence soar,î she said.Arcara said she attributes much of that confidence to selling cookies, because it is not just about sales. The girls make up personal and troop goals and learn important skills along the way, she said.ìThey do it primarily as a means to raise funds for the troop,î Arcara said. ìIt is also a means to develop the girlsí skills. Their age determines the skills they will learn. It ranges from money-management skills to business ethics skills and goal-setting. But there is always a service commitment aspect to it. They have to come up with goals for themselves and then something they want to do to better the community.îSuzanne Branksy has two teenage daughters who have been in Girl Scouts since they were Daisies, the youngest group of the Girl Scout program. She said selling cookies has been a vast learning experience for her girls. ìA good troop leader will ask the girls before cookie sales start what they want to accomplish as a troop,î Bransky said. ìThe leader breaks down how much different Girl Scout events cost, and the girls have to work out how to earn that money.îThe girls earn extra credit based on the number of boxes of cookies they sell, Bransky said. Patches or ìcookie creditsî can be used to purchase trips to various camps like a business camp or a school-related, goal-setting camp; or the credits can go toward a gift card to use in the troopís store to purchase trinkets or supplies for their troop activities, Arcara said.Additionally, the troop receives a share of the net proceeds from the cookie sales, Arcara said. For each box sold, the troop gets 60 cents, she said. The remainder goes to the Girl Scouts council, which is the leadership group for the area, the Girl Scouts organization and the cookie baker, she said.In the past, Girl Scouts were often selling cookies door-to-door, but that avenue has not been as popular today because of safety concerns Arcara said. ìWe start training months in advance on safety,î she said. ìWe discourage them from wandering into neighborhoods they are not familiar with, and enforce the Girl Scouts rule that they must be with an adult that can vouch for their safety.îThe girls are not allowed to handle the money, Bransky said. They take the payment, bring it to the adult, help count out the change and then take the change back to the customer, she said.Bransky said she and her girls learned first-hand the reason those rules are in place. ìI took them door-to-door in an indoor apartment complex to sell, and one woman opened the door with nothing on from the waist up,î she said.There are two other avenues to sell cookies, Arcara said. The Girl Scouts can sell them online and have the cookies shipped directly from the Girl Scouts organization, or they can sell at booths outside businesses or at events, she said.Out of the eight different types of Girl Scout cookies available, the Falcon area, as with the rest of the nation, appears to favor Thin Mints and Samoas, Arcara said.The troop will wrap up cookie sales on March 13.
