I write this fully knowing the consequences. I apologize in advance for the blood about to be shed. However, I’ve held my tongue long enough. I’m only doing this for the good of society. Here goes:
Girl Scout Cookies are tasteless saturated fat guilt bombs that prey on the weak and obese in pursuit of questionable goals by a cult that has been allowed to exist for far too long.
But let me tell you how I really feel.
***
The Cookies Themselves
They’re hard. They’re brittle. They have to be modified (freeze your Thin Mints!) in order to make them palatable. They’re overpriced.
Seriously, a box of dry tasteless cookies for $6???
They’re inconsistent. East Coast cookies are made by a different manufacturer (and I chose the word manufacturer on purpose because they’re mass-produced like IKEA furniture and taste just as good) than West Coast cookies.
***
The Sales By Guilt Tactic
I thought we had Child Labor laws in this country. Apparently, the Girl Scouts believe our young girls should emulate their Asian counterparts and get to producing for Dear Leader as soon as possible.
The poor girls are forced (and yes, I say forced because they have no choice. They’re minors. They’re easily exploited) to stand in front of supermarkets and ask strangers if they would like to buy a cookie. Granted, it’s good training for eventual careers in sex work, but is that what we should be teaching them?
And I say this as the uncle of two girls that were brownies and had to go through this. You know what I did to keep them off the street?
I bought the entire case they were given to sell.
Oh, don’t get it twisted. Like contract workers in the Middle East, they are expected to sell a certain amount of boxes of cookies before they get their passports back. You don’t want to know what happens if they don’t.
So, they stand there, as you are walking in or out of the market with one of the moms overseeing them. If you get a good mom, she’s wearing a skin tight outfit and attracting the customers. If you get a bad mom, she makes the girls do all the work and gets on their case if they don’t approach every person walking by.
A good pimp makes all the difference.
And don’t get me started on the poor Moms and Dads that have to take the boxes to the office and try to sell them there. That’s humiliating and, if the Mom or Dad is a boss, borders on establishing a hostile workplace. You are forced to buy a box for fear of retaliation.
***
Where The Money Goes
As I said, my nieces both were in the first stage of Girl Scouts. They didn’t learn shit. They very quickly decided they wanted to do other activities besides Girl Scouts.
Here is what the Girl Scouts say they do.
Here is what they REALLY do:
Lie to girls and tell them they are running cookie businesses when in reality they’re just selling Confederated Products.
Brainwash girls into thinking flair is a good thing.
Take a gigantic profit off of free labor to fund lobbying efforts to support seemingly worthy causes. However, the leadership is not apolitical, as the organization aims to be. And the distribution of cookie funds is… interesting.
***
In summary, if you want a really good cookie, either go the Yeah Right route and bake it yourself from scratch, buy it from a local bakery (the more ethnic the better), or take a drive out to Pepperidge Farm.
Up here we get 2 kinds. Chocolate and Vanilla. As a stoner I can say that even when high as fuck the cookies are mediocre.
So I hear you all. And nothing you say rings false.
But.
Even the modern lower-quality Tag-Alongs (peanut butter with chocolate) are the key to a very specific neurochemical lock in my brain.
It’s like You Shook Me All Night Long. Objectively, there’s not much to separate it from most of AC/DC’s other fine work. But it hits at a very specific speed and angle so as to trigger involuntary air-drumming.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3zCnTgdLG0
Dead-on accurate.
Yes to both of these things. Our brains are twins!
I’m indifferent about the cookies. They aren’t that good and are expensive for what you are getting, but can handle supporting the kids. so meh. Glad my kids didn’t last long in scouts, not that there weren’t other things that they did for fundraising (looking at you music programs).
Back when finding summertime daycare for our daughter was an issue, we looked into Girl Scouts strictly for the summer Girl Scout day camp. You could join online for cheap, just to unlock that day camp.
Guess I threw my back out. That’s bad.
Hurray for two Bob’s Burgers .gifs in the same morning. That’s good.
I don’t think there’s any potassium benzoate this time.
I pinched a nerve on my lower right side. I can still lift and carry, but if I turn at my waist, my nerves go off like an Operation game.
I feel like Michael Keaton wearing the Batsuit,
Facebook and Instagram is down. We’re just one XTwitter outage away from fixing society.
Funny that happening on Super Tuesday.
I will continue to tease the girls and flirt with the hot Mom’s till the day I die folks. Thin mints and cold milk justify all that I do. As an unapologetically alpha male of my tribe, my people expect no less!
It’s true. Nothing like hearing MILFY complain that her husband has had to buy so many cases and responding with, “that shouldn’t be a problem.”
Paying $6 for cookies is how I Demonstrate Value.
Opening the box, plastic wrapper, and offering her one is how you Engage Physically?
This should have been in yesterday’s draft.
Thin Mints are good, actually.
While they are better frozen this is true for other candies, like Kits Kats or Reese’s.
I prefer them refrigerated. You get the crispness without turning them into shrapnel when you break them in your hands/mouth.
Here we go…
No, no.
Unlike some “Christians” I feel no need to evangelize. If you’re determine to go to hell, (where all the cupboard are stocked with Samoas and Tagalongs), I will not stand in your way.
Unlike Boy Scout popcorn, Girl Scout cookies sell themselves. Back in the dawn of time, pre-covid, most people I worked with were excited to see the girl scout cookie order form.
They’re too expensive, and they’ve cheaped out on the ingredients in the past couple of years. If you’re dying to get them, Aldi sells knockoffs of most of the varieties, and Keebler makes some knockoffs as well.
I had no idea Boy Scout popcorn was a thing.
You know why?
Because they don’t have boys pimped out on the corner pushing it like they were on Santa Monica Blvd.
You just ain’t looking hard enough. I see them at Sam’s Club, Target, etc around Christmastime. Not as common as GS cookies, because the popcorn is expensive. Instead of a $6 box of Thin Mints, it’s a $20 can of caramel corn.
I could be inventing this completely in my head, but I thought that the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts here in the US wanted to merge. The Boy Scouts wanted to get their hands on that Girl Scout cookie money, and the Girl Scouts wanted to get their hands on the cachet that Eagle Scout has. The Girl Scouts have an Eagle Scout analog called the Gold award, that nobody has ever heard of.
This I do know happened: the Boy Scouts decided to let girls into the Boy Scouts, now called Scouts BSA. A coworker and his son were into Scouting, and they dropped out because of that change in policy. His argument was that boys + girls != boys only, and that there were some lessons that were easier to teach to adolescents like Boy Scouts when no girls are allowed. I sort of get that, but I wasn’t convinced he was correct.
I actually agree that Boy Scout and Girl Scouts are probably better off separate, because it allows adolescents to hang out with their own gender, (takes can of worms off shelf, opens it, flings contents blindly over shoulder), without the pressure of the other sex being around. And iirc the Girl Scouts weren’t that thrilled with the decision.
That said, there are far bigger problems with BSA than whether girls are included in the troops.
Since it’s Tuesday I’ll agree with you. Ask me tomorrow and I might say, “Human beings should get used to being around the opposite sex without acting like total idiots.” Boy/girl overnight trips are a solved problem (for certain values of ‘solved’).
Until recently Scouting was gender-neutral for all the countries of the world except for the USA and these countries: Bahrain, Barbados, Botswana, Kuwait, Lesotho, Liberia, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Swaziland, UAE, and Yemen. Not a good look IMO.
I was in the Boy Scouts and have never heard of Boy Scout popcorn.
It wasn’t a thing back when you and Baden-Powell were running the streets.
Google ‘BSA popcorn sale’ and you’ll see a ton of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zCO4j4MrxE&pp=ygUgYWRkYW1zIGZhbWlseSBnaXJsIHNjb3V0IGNvb2tpZXM%3D
Bound by honor and blood oaths to post this when opportunity presents itself.
As it was foretold.
It’s a fair question.
Full support! Never have I ever yearned for a Girl Scout cookie, not even the ones with coconut and chocolate. They’re fine, but I’d rather eat a Twix every time.
But the buying was good for work morale: I buy your daughter’s cookies, you buy my daughter’s raffle tickets for prom or other extracurriculars. Although being out of that transactional / guilting ring altogether is better.
We all do it for da chillrens
My ass-centric, fellow Stillers colleague is correct about their sales tactics and the fat content.
As a man who gripes about the lackadaisical blonde at Crumbl doing jack, knowing jack, and caring jack (and, most importantly if you’re going 0-fer that list, not offering me the jack) existing to flip me a screen to tip her 25% on Overpriced Widgets — I am not enthused to see society teaching young girls to stand outside and look pretty to sell something.
But a buck is a buck and, what, am I really supposed to be again shocked by __________ ?
Selling cookies was by far the worst thing about being in girl scouts. The rest of it was actually pretty good, or at least I had a good troUpe. I learned tons of camping stuff and if I’m ever stranded in the woods it’s the only reason I would have a shot at surviving.
Back in my day we were supposed to go door to door selling that crap. They stopped that for obvious reasons. Haven’t had a girl scout cookie in probably 20 years and have no regrets on that score
My sisters and daughters learned from the experience and generally enjoyed it. Any well led youth function should strive for that, teach while having some fun.
That’s some good U usage right there.
Little Brownie vs ABC should always have been the real Cookie War.