Today, an acquaintance (I’ll call her “Laura”) asked me if I would buy some Girl Scout cookies from her daughter’s troop. I told her “No thank you.”
It’s not that I don’t enjoy eating Girl Scout cookies (I do enjoy Thin Mints and Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies). It’s not that I generally oppose the activities of Girl Scouts. I approve of much of what Girl Scouts do.
Here’s what triggered this post. Laura told me that the average box of cookies sells for three dollars and that the average profit for each box of cookies is only fifty cents. Hmmmm.
Therefore, I can support their Girl Scouts to the same extent by handing $5 directly to the local troop or by buying $30 worth of cookies. Unless you think that eating cookies is an especially good thing, it makes much more sense to simply hand the local troop $5. Then again, eating cookies, especially a lot of cookies, is not a good thing. Cookies consist largely of refined carbohydrates and sugars. These are exactly the kinds of ingredients that invite obesity. Are the Girl Scouts concerned about obesity? Very much so (so am I), yet they continue to rely on cookie sales to fund their activities.
But let’s go back to the money for a moment. If you click here, you can see it stated that “all of the revenue” from cookie sales “stays with the local Girl Scout council that sponsors the sale.” The official site carefully points out that individual troops receive “from 12-17% of the purchase price of each box sold.” There are various important numbers that the site does not provide, however. For instance, is $.50 per box (the amount indicated to me by my acquaintance) the average amount of proceeds per box sold (as Laura indicated)? If so, the 12-17% of the purchase price of each box sold amounts to $.45 per box, which means that most of the proceeds go to the local troop. If true, it would be commendable. But we don’t know, because the Girl Scout organization does not specify how much profit is involved in the sale of each box of cookies.
All of this makes me wonder, because the Girl Scout organization is based in the middle of one of the highest rent districts in the world, 420 5th Ave in Manhattan. That’s where 400 employees work for the Girl Scout organization. But nowhere on the site will you find anything about the sales information I just mentioned, or other things I wonder, such as the salaries and perks of these 400 employees. Wouldn’t it be nice to know how much money it takes to run that fancy headquarters? How about a pie chart showing the sources of that money? Nowhere will you find the amount of that annual cookie profit money that flows back to the Girl Scout headquarters from determined efforts of little girls. Wouldn’t that be interesting to know? I suspect that, indirectly, cookie money flows back to the Girl Scout headquarters at a brisk rate. I’d be interested in knowing for sure, though, especially since my client has told me that the local troops have to purchase their own badges and other supplies with their own money. Much of what local Girl Scout troops do is not subsidized by cookie profits. I don’t know how much aggregate cookie profit is generated each year, because that is not on the website either. Maybe those cookie-revenue numbers are just too big to fit on the official Girl Scout webpage!
I have occastionally supported local Girl Scouting activity, despite my concerns with the financially opaque corporate hierarchy. I’ve decided, though, that my solution will now be to offer a direct donation to the local troop, just as I mentioned at the top of this post. Five dollars handed to a little girl who approaches you to sell cookies is the equivalent of buying $30 worth of cookies, and you can rest assured that all of that money will stay with the local troop. If you really want to get good bang for the buck and you usually buy $30 for the cookies, just hand the full $30 to local troop–that’s like buying $180 worth of cookies. In the process, everyone will be healthier and the local troop will be flush with cash to spend on those badges and other supplies that the national organization refuses to buy for them.
The Girl Scout cookie phenomenon raises an interesting issue about the way Americans think of charities. Why is it that people insist on getting something back for themselves in order to donate money to allegedly good causes? The Girl Scout cookie phenomenon is a classic case of this need for a quid pro quo. If someone really believed in the Girl Scouts, they shouldn’t need to receive cookies in return for supporting the Girl Scouts. Rather, they would just hand the local troop some money (as I’ve suggested above).
This problem (the need for a quid pro quo when soliciting for charities), is not peculiar to Girl Scouts. It’s everywhere you look. Almost every institutional charity offers stuff to people who donate. Mugs, T-shirts, videos, CDs, plaques, special access to celebrities, umbrellas, admissions to amusements, paperweights, inscribed souvenirs, admission to concerts or other special events.
Sometimes an organization will invite you to turn down any sort of gift. Kudos for those people who do so, those people who realize that demanding a gift in return for their contribution effectively reduces their contribution. They realize that those mugs, T-shirts and cookies are not free. And furthermore, who really needs more stuff of that sort?
All of this makes me wonder what kind of people we’ve become that so many of us insist on getting substantial amounts of stuff back in order to “contribute” to charities. I would suspect we’ve reached new levels of proficiency at being rampant consumers. See here and here .
Admittedly, this need for a quid pro quo is nothing new. After all, people were selling indulgences hundreds of years ago. But now, it is also much more visible and so widely accepted. It makes me frustrated enough to go eat half a box of Thin Mints. If only I had bought those cookies . . .
Ted: "I’m taking orders for ‘Camp Girl Cookies’ on behalf of my daughter."
Ted: "How many dozen can I guilt you into buying."
Dilbert: "I’ve always wondered, Ted, why do they sell cookies? Is it just for the money?"
Ted: "No, it’s to help them build character by earning their own money."
Dilbert: "Oh, so your daughter is doing some selling from door-to-door?"
Ted: "No, too dangerous. My wife and I are doing all the selling at work."
Dilbert: "Well, then aren’t you only teaching your daughter to act helpless so other people will do her work?"
Ted: "Just buy the stupid cookies!!"
Dilbert: "Have you considered foster care for your kids?"
For me, the annual appearance of Girl Scout cookies signals the beginning of coercive selling tactics at the entrance to my local supermarket. Fresh faced, innocent children are being used to push more sugar and fat into the already bloated gut of America. I feel terrible turning down their squeaky pleas to buy cookies. They don't understand how they are being used.
This post ties into Erich's recent post about his new diet and exercise program. Why is it that most fundraisers sell things that I try to avoid putting in my body? Cookies and peanut brittle and candy bars and caramel popcorn and pizza kits; I don't want thses things in my house but somehow they have become a yearly staple of school and children's organization fundraisers. If forced to buy I usually give the stuff away but I still feel guilty because I don't want anyone else in my family to eat that crap either!
Erich's solution is a good one. From now on I wil just give a donation and let them keep the sweets.
This is just not true. My wife is chief cookie pusher for her area, or "council". IIRC, the cost of the cookies to the girl scouts is about half the sale price. Of the remainder, 100% stays in the *area* with some going to the local troop itself and the rest to the local council to help fund summer camps and so on. Each council decides for itself what the exact breakdown will be.
So, it's possible that only 0.50$ for each box was going to that girl's troop, but a buck or more was going to her local council to fund GS activities for her area.
Do you really think the moms would pull their hair out for a month dealing with all the hassle these cookies create for only a couple hundred bucks of funds? They could raise that much in one day with a car wash.
They expect something back from charitys because America is the most capitalist nation in the world and that is how markets work, you do not go to market with nothing to sell.
I was a Girl Scout for 12 years and now am a registered adult for life. I did the Fall sales and the Cookie sales. I completely agree with this post. My troop always tried to push fall products more because the troop itself get A LOT more money from those than Cookies, granted cookies sold easier and it was a HUGE pain to get those cookies to everyone. But if you are buying to support a certain troop, just give them the money, they will benefit more and I think it becomes a tax write off too. Of course, you can still buy the box of cookies for a rainy day to make you feel better. 🙂
This is incredibly f***ing cynical. All the talk about "how dare they sell cookies" is absolutely insane. They're not telling you to eat 40 boxes of them in a single sitting and have a diabetic attack and die. Girl Scouts selling cookies in America is somewhat of a tradition and to attack them for it now simply because being anti-snack foods is de rigeur with whiny blowhards is ridiculous. Next time you want to spend 1,000 words complaining about something, try picking a topic that matters.
I've always wondered why the girl scouts didn't simply didn't teach girls some of the fundamental concepts behind capitalism… you know, owning the means of production, turning raw materials into something of greater value and selling that something for more than it costs to transform, ship and advertise it. Basic stuff. I can only conclude that the corporate girl scout cookie drives actually reinforce the concept of not being able to do for ones self what a corporate nipple can provide (with little effort) while kicking back only 16% to the army of guilt enabled sales kids that sells the product.
…makes you wonder why the boy scouts don't bother with the thinly veiled charade of "you can't do it yourself; so, sharecrop for your corporate masters" mind rot.
In some areas troops aren't allowed to take direct donations. Instead any money you donate is used to buy cookies for charity, often the soliders in Iraq or local food banks.
Here are a couple examples of the actual break down of money. Even if only 50 cents goes to the troop the girls do benefit from the rest of the money as well.
http://www.girlscoutsofscc.org/cookies_money.html http://money.cnn.com/2007/03/23/smbusiness/girlsc…
The national offices in New York aren't supported by the cookie sale.
it's sad when you look at all the major charities of the world and see them with really really really nice buildings making millions of dollars
well, as for donating to charities and getting back mugs, t-shirts and other odds-and-ends, i am sure there are people who do like collecting such stuff. for instance, the wwf sometimes offers stuffed toys in return for charities, and these entice little kids a lot. of course, they can always go to the local disney store and get their favourite teddy, but this way they also get the good feeling of supporting a cute li'l baby panda. and for the parents its 2 birds in a hand as well. of course, you can say that at the heart of all this lies the wicked consumerist behaviour, but since that is a given and very unlikely to change, these organizations might as well play to this psychology and get more donations by roping in more people in addition to the already charitable ones. you are going to buy a teddy anyway, so if you are feeling generous, might as well buy a slightly more expensive one and save a panda in the process. sniff-sniff.
The most disappointing about girl scout cookies to me is that the girl scouts don't make them. Seems like a great activity to me. And they could sell homemade cookies for a lot more, and keep all the profits. Furthermore, we wouldn't have all that stupid packaging. Just more wholesome all the way around.
According to the publicly available federal tax return filed by the Girl Scouts of America in 2004-2005, the CEO of the Girl Scouts, Kathy Cloninger, earned a little over $630,000 in that fiscal year. Check out http://www.guidestar.org for information about other non-profits.
Team car washes might be worse – you get like 20 people together and if you're lucky you make like $300 for a full day of work. That's 20 people * 8 hours each = 160 person-hours, so just under $2/hour each. I always felt like it would be a lot more efficient if I just got a job at McDonalds for the weekend and donated my income.
I really don't understand where you're getting this. You're saying that people are going cookies _in order to_ donate to the Girl Scouts? I would say that very few people are doing that.
IMEO, the majority of people are buying them because those cookies are damn delicious and you can't get them anywhere else. If the cookies were available year-round at your local supermarket, you think there'd be any point to the Girl Scouts going through this hassle? Or of local clusters (like army detachments and college campuses) buying huge amounts of them? No! People are not 'donating to the Girl Scouts' they are _paying_ for _cookies_. This is sale of a product on which the Girl Scouts have a monopoly, not some corporate conspiracy to make you think you're donating to charity.
What about those Samoans, eh???
Another reason not to buy them: most of the Girl Scout cookies still contain hydrogenated oils. Apparently they have removed most of the trans fat, but in 2007, there's no good reason the makers should still be using any hydrogenated oils at all. If you want to support the Girl Scouts, make a donation instead of buying the cookies!
Josh, it apparently does matter, or WE wouldn't be so emotional! Mostly atheists post here (by most people's definition of atheist), and tend to talk about what they don't like rather than what they do like. Of course we like certain things and prefer to keep them the way they are, but these are less controversial and don't make for discussions (ie. I love the Beatles, do you? Yup, sure do!). We do however want certain things changed (or at least discussed) although they may seem trivial on the surface. Some of the previously discussed themes here which make Girl Scout Cookies story quite relevant include; unnecessary spending, members-only organizations, price-gouging, obesity, turtles, profiteering, following the herd, Samoans, authority figures taking advantage of kids, grasshoppers, charity, etc.
The argument made above about charities with nice buildings and charity CEOs with big salaries is a bad one. I agree that having more of my donation go to the scouts and their activities is desirable.
However, I don't think that large organizations like the girl scouts could attract high-caliber talent to run the organization by working out of a shack in the desert with no air-conditioning and no pay. Local troops which require only a few hours a week from the "mothers" can easily be run by volunteers, but there are many jobs that require 40 hr/week talent at the top of the organization in order to give the girls a good experience and the largest bang for their buck.
Large corporations are run efficiently by paying for talent, why can't charitable organizations do the same?
There is public information available about most large and medium sized nonprofit organizations:
http://www.charitynavigator.org/
You will be able to see how efficient they are (how much they bring in and then spend on certain items, including salaries of the 5 top execs). It's as close to a annual report as you can get for a nonprofit. Happy reading!
Very well written and thought provoking. I'm sure this will come to mind next time I see scouts selling cookies… I don't know if I'll be able to resist the thin mints nonetheless though… 😉
According to CharityNavigator.org:
Kathy Cloninger (CEO) made $333,238 in FY 2005 (0.41% of expenses.) It would be quite interesting to follow the money to other local Girl Scouts branches and see how much in total goes to salaries (i.e., how much does the national organization give to the NY branch, whose CEO – Rosa Agosto – makes $120,000).
having been in the nonprofit world for quite a while now, i have to say it always amazes me how the general public somehow expect large charitable organizations to be incredibly effective while simultaneously spending precisely $0 on salaries, office space, and "overhead".
for years i tried to try to cat-herd volunteer programmers and you know what? volunteers show up when they want, leave when they want, flake at the drop of a hat, insist on doing things in the language of their choice ("i'm doing this in java instead of php beacause i'm trying to brush up on my java skills…"), and they don't make deadlines. and i don't fault any of them for being like that – i'd be the same way. in the end i just hired someone because, as i told him over the phone, "i'm going to pay you market rate because i want shit done when i say so and not whenever you feel like it."
yes, there are some egregious abuses of charitable funds, and i fart in the general direction of those people. but good, director-level people cost $100k a year and they're worth it. likewise with office space — if you have an office in manhattan, your chances of getting a "trophy wife volunteer" (i.e., someone with an amazing professional or political background willing to work for nothing because they're "set for life") are dramatically increased, as are your chances of getting high-profile donors to come to your functions.
you get what you pay for.
The economics of scout fund raisers is always questionable. But it's as much about learning to organise and manage money and to work for it as it is about the receipts themselves. Let's face it *most* girl scouts are going to be from middle class families that could afford to pay for their childrens' activies out of their own pockets. Anyway the whole pretext of "girl scouts" is dumb. Why not just have one organisation with boys and girls in it? At the world jamborees it is always the americans who can't deal with being at camp with both sexes and end up getting sent home for inappropriate behavior.
I ran into the same problem with my son was in elementary school. They sold candy – the "world's best" which is crap. I was going to buy a case anyway, and give it to the Sally Ann or something. When I realized how little they made I wrote a letter that in lieu of flogging yucky chocolates door to door we would make a cash donation of $25. The school loved it and from the next year onwards they included that option on the permission slip. It's a good solution if you really want to help but you don't want the junk.
The mugs, t-shirts, etc. are also a way for the non-profits to advertise their existence to people in the social network of those who donate to them.