

Are Girl Scout Cookies Corrupting? - gwern
http://www.gwern.net/Girl%20Scouts%20and%20good%20governance.html

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baddspellar
I'm the volunteer cookie sale manager for my daughter's service unit, which
consists of ~35 troops and ~400 girls. We're part of the Girl Scouts of
Eastern Massachusetts Council, one of two councils in Massachusetts.

The cookie sale is primarily a fundraiser for a council. The council sets the
price (in our case, $4.00 per box). Out of the $4.00 per box, here's where the
money goes:

Council Programs and Properties (50%): $2.00 Baker (22.5%): $0.90 Troop
Proceeds (15.5%): $0.62 Administration (9%): $0.36 Girl Incentives (3%): $0.12

GSUSA gets their cut out of the Baker's share as a licensing fee.

If you look at the Program Guide for our council,
(<http://www.girlscoutseasternmass.org/programs/>) you'll see that it offers a
large number of programs and camps for girls in eastern MA, at very reasonable
cost. Half the money from the sale goes towards property maintenance and
operations, keeping the cost down for all girls, and for scholarships for
girls who cannot otherwise afford them.

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ansy
Something isn't quite right about this article. First the author compares the
rise in cookies prices compared to inflation instead of commodity prices. This
was a red flag to me that was repeated more than once.

Fuel and food prices have been rising sharply these past few years. I'm not a
commodities expert so maybe someone with more insight can help, but this chart
looks like wheat prices went up 50% in 2010 alone and are double what they
were in 1995.

<http://futures.tradingcharts.com/hist_CW.html>

This has been in the news quite a bit.

[http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/03/16/business/main20043...](http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/03/16/business/main20043737.shtml)

So that $2.50 pack of white label cookies from WalMart was probably $1 way
back in 1995. It's not surprising that the $2 pack of Girl Scout cookies from
1995 is $4 today.

There was an awful lot of text and analysis for completely missing this point.

To the author's other complaint that cookies are cost inefficient, all of
these cookie sale type fundraisers (e.g. bake sales, car washes, popcorn
sales, magazine sales, cheese and sausage sales) are obviously less efficient
than direct donations. But I suppose they serve a few other purposes than fund
raising. Scouts potentially learn life skills about working and business
instead of how to beg for money with tangible benefits for the troop. The
proliferation of cookie boxes are free advertising real estate in millions of
offices and homes that lead to greater participation and perhaps more
donations than if the Girl Scouts solicited for donations directly. Those are
just a couple of reasonable explanations off the top of my head before jumping
to accusations of corruption most high.

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illumin8
Girl Scout cookies are about the worst cookies for you I have ever seen. I
used to like them when I was a kid, but then I looked at the ingredients. In
order to make them have a shelf life of months (long enough to be sold) at
room temperature, they are loaded with trans fats, preservatives, and all
kinds of bad chemicals. It's nice to support the girl scouts, but seriously,
they are poisoning America with this junk. Can't we just give them a few bucks
instead of buying toxic cookies?

~~~
calloc
They can be as toxic as they want to be. I will still continue to eat them ;-)

