Name: How Girl Scouts’ $800 Million Cookie Empire Works | The Economics Of | WSJ
Uploaded: 2023-06-11T21:01:30.000Z
Duration: 6 min 23 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This is First Lady Grace Coolidge 100 years ago on the White House lawn.

She's 11, and has been a Girl Scout for six years.

I wouldn't say it's well-managed, but it's so enthusiastically managed that you almost end up rooting for them.

Their success is due to a number of factors.

Nostalgia, yes, but also smart sales tactics, strategic expansions, and unlimited supply.

This year, they introduced a new flavor, the Raspberry Rally, to be sold only online.

Within hours, it was gone; there was no stock left.

This is The Economics of Girl Scout Cookies.

During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Girl Scouts tried to adapt their in-person tactics to the online world with middling success.

2021 saw the biggest impact in terms of Girl Scout Cookies sales because all these troops were having to balance social distancing with selling their cookies.

This year, Girl Scouts have resumed in-person and booth sales, but the COVID era trend of digital sales has remained popular.

I think the girls are mostly unfazed because they are quite nimble with working online.

Typically, cookie-selling season runs from December to mid-April.

But a shortage this year has forced some regions like New York City to sell cookies later into the year so that the suppliers have time to bake more cookies.

Even with adapted sales schedules, Girl Scout Cookie customers may still be out of luck for certain flavors.

This year's new flavor, the Raspberry Rally, sold out in hours, but that very limited supply could actually benefit the Girl Scouts.

Because cookies are typically sold four months out of the year, customers have to get them while they're in season or risk waiting another year.

The strategy, I think, works really well because you keep people's interest in the cookies by introducing new flavors.

New flavors can be modeled off of best selling ones.

It just triggers a whole bunch of other memories associated with other Girl Scout Cookies.

You bank on the advantage that you're giving people something new,

but that's also sort of associated with something that you're familiar with, whether it's a cookie or a childhood memory.

Certain cookies that don't sell well are phased out, but the organization makes sure to keep longstanding classics,

like Trefoils and Thin Mints, which have been around in some form since at least the 1950s.

You can have, like, say, for example, a mascara or a lipstick that's a classic color, and something that you see constant demand for.

To keep a classic like the Thin Mints around is to center the campaign of selling cookies around something that people instantly recognize.

Girl Scouts list five skills troops learn from selling cookies.

Goal-setting, decision-making, money management, people skills, and business ethics.

The way that the cookie program works is that you set a goal.

It helps that those goals are incentivized.

I'm trying to sell 2,500 cookies because if you do that, you get a Broadway show as the prize,

and that sounds really fun and I love musicals, so I definitely wanna go to one.

A Girl Scout must choose where and when to sell her cookies, how to market them, and help decide where her troop's collective cookie fund should go.

The key player in figuring out the distribution of these cookies?

A lot of the parents are often troop leaders, especially the moms, or they participate in other parts of the program, like being a co-cookie chair.

They take upon themselves a lot of the logistics and the planning and where their children will be at any given time to sell these cookies.

Usually, the troop or a Girl Scout's parents purchase the cookies before any sales are made.

So, they're on the hook to make up the money that they have already spent in buying or procuring the boxes that they said that they were gonna sell.

All sales proceeds, according to the Girl Scouts, go to the troops to pay for that year's upcoming activities.

Girl Scouts receive scripts and training to get to know the products.

They also receive advice on their sales pitches.

The goal is to sharpen their people skills.

It has definitely helped me talk to people and, like, communicate what I want.

Typically, Girl Scouts sell cookies to their family and friends or customers in the neighborhood.

It's still very much a grassroots movement.

No one sees it as, you know, a big cookie.

No one looks at it as this big corporate grab that you associate with some of the bigger brands.

Even with the parents behind the major operations, the selling point is still the Girl Scouts themselves.

Don't buy cookies from an alligator; don't buy cookies from a giraffe.

Buy cookies from Girl Scouts, because they're really good.

There is some criticism regarding the fact that, if you're a rich parent, you can just throw money at the problem⏤buy up all the boxes, you know, done.

The program's done, you've made the money; everything's hunky dory.

But that defeats the purpose, as many parents have told me,

of teaching their children financial literacy and having them go through the process of learning procurement,

learning distribution, learning sales, and then learning to manage money, actual physical money.

You can see them physically, you know, doing the math in their head, calculating what they've gotta give back to a customer.

And I think if a parent just swoops in and buys all the boxes or buys too many boxes, it defeats the purpose of what the program stands for.

And learning effective sales tactics, like offering samples of the underselling types of cookies

or encouraging customers to buy more than one box of their favorites helps the next year run smoothly.

I think the Girl Scout Cookies inhabit a very unique ecosystem when it comes to selling cookies compared to your everyday brands that you're familiar with,

whether they're Oreos or any kind of digestive biscuits or whatever cookies that people prefer.

Their main draw is that they are available for a very short period of time every year,

and you also bank on people's memories of eating these cookies as they were growing up.

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How Girl Scouts’ $800 Million Cookie Empire Works | The Economics Of | WSJ

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