It’s Girl Scout cookie season! This is the time of year when boxes of Thin Mints, Caramel Delights and Peanut Butter Patties begin to whimsically appear in offices, cupboards, and lunch bags across America. It’s also a time of year when young girls learn to be entrepreneurs, selling cookies to raise money and prizes for their troop. GS cookies were seriously my first venture into the world of marketing and sales, (not to brag, but I was in the GS Cookie Hall of Fame two years in a row, fact!). Without cookie sales, I never would have been able to go to Summer camp, and those trips to Camp Deer Lake and Camp Sugar Pine were invaluable to me growing up.
And so I was a bit upset when I heard about Wild Freeborn’s (real name!) story. In an effort to sell enough cookies to send her entire troop to camp, Wild made a youtube video promoting cookie sales. But when parents from neighboring counties heard about the tech savvy 8-year-old’s tactics, they all turned into cookie monsters and demanded that the video be taken down saying that it was unfair to other girls in the community. I don’t know. If anything I think this smart cookie should be given a badge for computer savviness.
And what about all those parents who take their kid’s order form to work and load up on orders that way? Wouldn’t that be an unfair advantage as well? When I was selling I had a stay at home mom, and a daddy who worked on a loading dock. Nobody was selling cookies but me, so I got creative, going to movie theaters and the picnic areas of Golden Gate Park on the weekend. Competition breeds creativity, something that should be encouraged to these girls. Give Wild a break! She’s just trying to go to camp!
