- [Narrator] This is First Lady Grace Coolidge
100 years ago on the White House lawn.
She's holding a Girl Scout Cookie.
And this is Tula in 2023.
She's 11 and has been a Girl Scout for six years.
- I wouldn't say it's well-managed,
but it's so enthusiastically managed
that you almost end up rooting for them.
- [Narrator] Their success is due to a number of factors.
Nostalgia, yes, but also smart sales tactics,
strategic expansions and unlimited supply.
- This year they introduced a new flavor,
the Raspberry Rally, to be sold only online.
Within hours, it was gone.
There was no stock left.
- [Narrator] This is The Economics of Girl Scout Cookies.
During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Girl Scouts tried
to adapt their in-person tactics to the online world
with middling success.
- 2021 saw the biggest impact
in terms of Girl Scout Cookies sales,
because all these troops were having to balance
social distancing with selling their cookies.
- [Narrator] This year, Girl Scouts have resumed
in person and booth sales, but the COVID era
trend of digital sales has remained popular.
- I think the girls are mostly unfazed
because they are quite nimble with working online.
- [Narrator] Typically, cookie selling season runs
from December to mid-April,
but a shortage this year has forced some regions
like New York City to sell cookies later into the year,
so that the suppliers have time to bake more cookies.
Even with adapted sales schedules,
Girl Scout Cookie customers may still be out of luck
for certain flavors.
This year's new flavor, The Raspberry Rally,
sold out in hours, but that very
limited supply could actually benefit the Girl Scouts.
Because cookies are typically sold four months
out of the year,
customers have to get them
while they're in season or risk waiting another year.
- The strategy, I think, works really well
because you keep people's interest in the cookies
by introducing new flavors.
- [Narrator] New flavors can be modeled off
of best selling ones.
- It just triggers a whole bunch
of other memories associated with other Girl Scout Cookies.
You bank on the advantage that you're giving people
something new, but that's also sort of associated
with something that you're familiar with,
whether it's a cookie or a childhood memory.
- [Narrator] Certain cookies that don't sell well
are phased out, but the organization makes sure
to keep longstanding classics,
like Trefoils and Thin Mints,
which have been around in some form
since at least the 1950s.
- It's a classic marketing strategy.
You can have like say for example,
a mascara or a lipstick, that's a classic color,
and something that you see constant demand for.
To keep a classic like the Thin Mints around
is to center the campaign of selling cookies
around something that people instantly recognize.
- [Narrator] Girl Scouts list five skills
troops learn from selling cookies.
Goal setting, decision making, money management,
people skills, and business ethics.
- The way that the cookie program works is that
you set a goal.
- [Narrator] It helps that those goals are incentivized.
If you sell enough, you can get prizes.
- I'm trying to sell 2,500 cookies, because if you do that,
you get a Broadway show as the prize,
and that sounds really fun and I love musicals,
so I definitely wanna go to one.
- [Narrator] Next is decision Making.
A Girl Scout must choose where and when to sell her cookies,
how to market them and help decide where her troops
collective cookies fund should go.
The key player in figuring out the distribution
of these cookies...
- The parent, a lot of the parents are often troop leaders,
especially the moms or they participate
in other parts of the program
like being a co-cookie chair.
They take upon themselves a lot of the logistics,
and the planning and where their children
will be at any given time to sell these cookies.
- Usually the troop or a Girl Scouts parents
purchase the cookies before any sales are made.
- So they're on the hook to make up the money
that they have already spent
in buying or procuring the boxes that they said
that they were gonna sell.
- [Narrator] All sales proceeds,
according to the Girl Scouts,
go to the troops to pay for that year's upcoming activities.
Girl Scouts receive scripts and training
to get to know the products.
They also receive advice on their sales pitches.
The goal is to sharpen their people skills.
- It has definitely helped me talk
to people and like communicate what I want.
- [Narrator] Typically, Girl Scouts sell cookies
to their family and friends
or customers in the neighborhood.
- It's still very much a grassroots movement.
No one sees it as you know, a big cookie.
No one looks at it as this big corporate grab
that you associate with some of the bigger brands.
This is as homegrown as it comes.
- [Narrator] Even with the parents behind
the major operations, the selling point
is still the Girl Scouts themselves.
- [Narrator] Don't buy cookies from an alligator.
Don't buy cookies from a giraffe.
Buy cookies from Girl Scouts, because they're really good.
- There is some criticism regarding the fact that,
if you're a rich parent, you can just throw money
at the problem, buy up all the boxes, you know, done.
The program's done, you've made the money.
Everything's hunky dory.
But that defeats the purposes,
many parents have told me, of teaching their children
financial literacy and having them go through the process
of learning procurement, learning distribution,
learning sales, and then learning to manage money.
Actual physical money.
You can see them physically, you know, doing the math
in their head, calculating what they've gotta
give back to our customer.
And I think if a parent just swoops in and buys
all the boxes or buys too many boxes,
it defeats the purpose of what the program stands for.
- And learning effective sales tactics,
like offering samples of the underselling types of cookies
or encouraging customers to buy more than
one box of their favorites
helps the next year run smoothly.
- I think the Girl Scout Cookies inhabit a very unique
ecosystem when it comes to selling cookies,
compared to your everyday brands that you're familiar with,
whether they're Oreos or any kind of digestive biscuits
or whatever cookies that people prefer.
Their main draw is that they are available
for a very short period of time every year,
and you also bank on people's memories
of eating these cookies as they were growing up.
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- Come out.
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