Community Corner
Girl Scout Cookies Make You Smarter!
It's cookie season. Don't miss your chance to buy several boxes and support your local troops. Cookies are available through March 27.
According to the official Girl Scout manual on selling cookies, customers are to be acknowledged with a polite "Thank you for supporting a Girl Scout."
After spending a morning selling cookies with my two girls at the corner of Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, we came up with our own marketing slogan.
"Girl Scout cookies make you smarter" brought a smile to many stressed-out college students in search of study food near the busy southern entrance to UC Berkeley.
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This is probably wishful thinking. Munching on these treats will likely just make you fatter. But they do help make my girls smarter by supporting our program activities!
Here’s some trivia and history about Girl Scouts – something to think about during our cookie sales from Feb. 11 to March 27.
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Girl Scouts have been around for almost 100 years, formed in 1912, and Girl Scouts have been selling cookies for almost as long. The earliest mention of a cookie sale was by the Mistletoe Troop in Muskogee, OK. The troop baked cookies and sold them in its high school cafeteria as a service project in December 1917.
In the 1930s, Girl Scout cookies were sold packaged in wax paper bags for about 25 cents per box.
Today, there are eight varieties available costing $4 each: Thin Mints, Samoas, Tagalongs, Do-Si-Dos, Trefoils, Lemon Chalet Cremes, Dulce de Leche,and Thank U Berry Munch.
According to the Girl Scouts website, "All varieties contain less than 0.5 grams trans fat per serving, which meets or exceeds the FDA guidelines for the 'zero trans fat' designation, and selected varieties can claim 100% trans-fat free status, meaning there’s not a speck of trans fats in the whole box."
About 93 cents goes toward the cost of the cookies and their sales. The remainder of the $4 is used to support programs by individual troops and regional or national Girl Scout offices.
Unfortunately, cookie purchases aren’t tax-deductible, because the IRS considers this a purchase of a product at fair market value. Only cookies bought through the "Gift of Caring" program are considered tax-deductible. For example, many Girl Scout supporters purchase cookies that they then donate to U.S. troops serving overseas. (The donor can choose the type of cookies they want to send).
AND FOR THE GIRL SCOUT COOKIE FANATICS...The newest cookie news is the Cookie Locator, which can be downloaded as a mobile App (just visit iLoveCookies.org), which lets you find your closest Girl Scout cookie booth on your cellphone.
Our informal research, based on selling cookies in Albany for the past few years, is that Samoas and Thin Mints are easily the most popular, outselling all the rest at least 5 to 1.
Our theory is that these are the most unique cookies, not something you can easily find in the stores.
We've also noticed that the best customers are former Girl Scouts and Girl Scout parents who associate the cookies with fond childhood memories.
And, contrary to whatever market surveys say, whenever the Girl Scouts try to introduce a new, low-fat, diet cookie, it always, always bombs.
My personal favorite is Thin Mints, eaten frozen, while my kids Sammy and Jackie love Samoa, and their dad Peter is a fan of Tagalong. They may not make me smarter but they sure make me happy.
