How to Get Cookies When There's No Scout In Sight
NEW YORK (
) -- Girl Scout cookie time is a sweet, faint ray of warm sunshine in an otherwise bleak winter for cubicle jockeys lucky enough to have a co-worker with a kid in the council or a suburban supermarket with a cookie-selling table set up each Saturday.
For the rest of us, it's a bit trickier to get a few boxes of thin mints. If you're in your 20s or early 30s and were weaned on the chocolate-encased peanut butter of Tagalongs or the caramel and coconut chewiness of doughnut-shaped Samoas, Girl Scout cookie season is a period of jittery withdrawal and flop sweats.
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This may not have been a problem when Girl Scout cookies were introduced in 1917 and knowing a few friends in their early 20s with scout-aged children wasn't uncommon. It gets a bit tougher as post-collegians move into the cities their suburban parents fled years ago and put off parenthood until after the hand stamps from their favorite band's shows have faded and the last of the late-night diner runs have been made long ago. As a result, Girl Scouts of the USA have had their $760 million fundraising behemoth distanced from the late-night snacking, income-expending demographic most likely to go to town on a box of Do-Si-Dos after last call.
So what do you do when your office happy-hour contingent doesn't include a scout leader or your online start-up somehow doesn't have the salary or benefits to support a scout parent? Is there a way to stock up on cookies without eliciting shrieks of "stranger danger" or having complete strangers tell you how worthless cocktail nights with your friends are once you've started spawning?
Fortunately for those cookie-craving in-betweeners, the 100-year-old Girl Scouts of the USA is extremely tech savvy for its age. While the organization is loath to allow one of its most precious commodities to be sold online, as the funds go directly to individual councils and one of the bigger points of the exercise is for scouts to learn people skills, spokeswoman Michelle Tompkins says the Girl Scouts are trying to make it easier to find cookie sales online while keeping the revenue local.
The Girl Scouts have set up a
to help would-be customers find the nearest cookie booth. There's also a
cookie-finding iPhone app
in
Apple's
(AAPL) - Get Report
App Store for those seeking scout snacks on the go. Once a cookie consumer has found one, however, the advantage shifts. While the office park and work-site crowds have to wait weeks for their order sheets to turn into cookies, parents with little clerks in training sell their baked wares without making the customer wait.
This approach has its pros and cons. If you're working in Midtown Manhattan, for example, there may not be a table set up in Herald Square -- but there's a booth just a quick PATH train ride away at the NJ Transit station in Hoboken, N.J. Sometimes you get lucky and find a booth in town, such as the one Chicagoans will get in March when the scouts set up at
Dominick's
supermarket on West Chicago Avenue. Other times the window's much smaller, as Boston residents discovered this month when a scout council set up one weekend at a city animal shelter but retreated to suburbs 27 miles away for the rest of the year.
That last scenario is perhaps the best example of why cookie seekers in the city should get on the case now. Cookie season is officially from October to May, but only 10% of all cookie sales come in the fall or early winter. Tompkins says 90% of all Girl Scout cookies are sold between January and April, after which it gets difficult to track down a box of Dulce de Leche cookies. Miss out and you'll have to wait for the scouts to get back from camp and situated at school and the temperatures to drop to a point where a chocolate-coated cookie isn't just a melty mess.
It gets even more complicated when you start to get picky about what your cookies are called. Girl Scout cookies are made by two bakers:
Kellogg's
(K) - Get Report
subsidiary Little Brownie Bakers in Louisville, Ky., and
George Weston Limited
's ABC Bakers in Richmond, Va. While Little Brownie cookies still hold on to legacy names such as Samoas, Tagalongs, Trefoils and Do-Si-Dos, ABC is a bit more straightforward with its Caramel deLites, Peanut Butter Patties, Shortbread and Peanut Butter Sandwich cookies. It's up to each council to decide which baker to go with, so cookie lovers may want to check in with their local before bawling out a scout over perceived PC issues.
-- Written by Jason Notte in Boston.
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Jason Notte is a reporter for TheStreet. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Esquire.com, Time Out New York, the Boston Herald, the Boston Phoenix, the Metro newspaper and the Colorado Springs Independent. He previously served as the political and global affairs editor for Metro U.S., layout editor for Boston Now, assistant news editor for the Herald News of West Paterson, N.J., editor of Go Out! Magazine in Hoboken, N.J., and copy editor and lifestyle editor at the Jersey Journal in Jersey City, N.J.
