Fighting the Man one little girl at a time

It’s that time of year again. All the little Girl Scouts are setup at supermarkets, shopping malls, and even your front door, knocking their delicious treats. I’ve always been pro-children, but I’m not sure how I feel about Girl Scout Cookies. It’s one of my personal policies to pull over and buy lemonade whenever I see a kid sitting at his own lemonade stand. I’ve always felt adults should reward positive behavior. If some eight-year old girl has the initiative and drive to sell lemonade at 50 cents a glass, adults should take three minutes out of their day and buy some. You might not be thirsty, but it doesn’t matter. Just think how much you made that kid’s day. They might have only made $8 for six hours of work, but $8 to a kid is like winning the lottery. Besides, at least this way they learn how to work for a living instead of having everything given to them. I just believe in reinforcing positive behaviour–and the lemonade stand issue is one of the things I live by.

That being said, I feel uncomfortable buying Girl Scout Cookies. While I applaud the kids for their effort and I know it’s for a good cause, I don’t like the idea rewarding the cookie makers. I read that every year, over 200 million boxes of Girl Scout Cookies are sold. Little Brownie Bakers and ABC/Interbake Foods make Girl Scout Cookies–I doubt they give ’em away for free. For each box sold, a percentage of the sale goes to the troop. The rest of it goes to the cookie maker.

It’s not a bad business plan if you think about it. Use cute, adorable children as your peddlers and sell under the guise of charity. What consumer can say no to a smiling, seven-year old girl asking you to buy a box of cookies (this guy)? It’s not a lie–the troop does benefit from each box of cookies–but so does Little Brownie Bakers. Every year, people buy the cookies because it seems like the right thing to do…but we’re also making the bakers rich.

It’s reasons like this I’m opposed to magazine sales and Little League candy bars. The spirit of it is a wonderful idea. But the folks who came up with the idea–the publishers of the magazines; the makers of chocolate–they push the idea because it helps drive profits. Every winter, Campbell pushes canned food drives…and consumers end up buying more soup. We sacrifice; the corporations profit–that’s not what charity is supposed to be about.

Girl Scout Cookies are nothing but a form of exploited child labor. Interbake Foods has kids–cheap labor–selling their cookies. The kids are ‘compensated’ by the amount of money they raised for their troop. I would to see actually dollars earned by a troop divided by the number of hours each girl put into the sale. Without having any hard data, I’m willing to be it’s far less than the minimum wage those girls would earn if they got jobs. I know no eight-year old girl is going to get a job (not with all the illegal immigrants flooding the job market) but that’s not my point. Girl Scout Cookies is a $700 million a year enterprise. The cookie makers are getting rich thanks to the cuteness, determination, and efforts of adolescent girls.

Instead of getting a box of cookies the buyer didn’t want, we’d be better off just giving the Girl Scouts cash. This way the troop gets 100 percent of the profits. The girls will have far more money to fund their activities. And there’s no bigwigs getting rich. But that’s just my take on a subject I know nothing about. What can I say? I got swamped twice over the past two days by those little darlings.