Were Southeast Minnesota Girl Scouts Impacted by the Excess Girl Scout Cookies this Year?
It's been circling the internet recently, that the Girl Scouts have 15 million boxes of unsold Girl Scout Cookies after the 2021 cookie sales. So I wanted to know how this excess of cookies impacted our local Girl Scouts in southeast Minnesota, if at all.
An Excess of 15 Million Boxes of Girl Scout Cookies
Many major news outlets, including NBC News, reported on this crazy excess of cookies. Kelly Parisi, a spokeswoman for Girl Scouts of the USA said that it's "unfortunate [but] it was to be expected" because most cookie sales happen in person. There were definitely places where you could buy cookies in person, at least around here. But of course, the pandemic had an impact on where they could be held (indoors vs. outdoors) and most likely fewer people went out to buy cookies in person.
Did This Excess of Cookies Impact Our Local Girl Scouts?
15 million boxes is A LOT of cookies. So I wanted to know how this excess may have impacted our local Girl Scouts. First, let's look at the "2021 Cookie Program By the Numbers" from the Girl Scout River Valleys' website.
3,380,000 boxes were sold
11,200 hard working Girl Scouts sold cookies this year
On average, each girl sold 302 boxes
Total Proceeds: $3,037,290
The most popular cookie sold: Thin Mints (no surprise)
Based on the numbers, 3.3 million boxes sounds like a ton! But I wanted to know if, despite their hard work, if they still ended up with extra cookies because of the pandemic. So I reached out to Girl Scout River Valleys on their website and got a response from their CEO, Tish Bolger.
Tish wrote, "Thanks to the diligence and teamwork from our girls and volunteers, Girl Scouts River Valleys is not one of the councils with significant excess inventory." She credits this to the hard work put in to track cookie sales each week "to ensure the additional cookie orders placed with the baker were as accurate as possible". Turns out, they ended this year's cookie sales "with a normal number of excess cookies."
This is great news! Sadly, the councils across the country that have a large excess of cookies now have a large financial impact they have to deal with. The speculation is if these councils will have a second sale of cookies this year or if they plan to donate them.