Again it's cookie season. Again they are messing things up and making them so much less fun and more complicated than needed. We haven't even gotten cookies yet - delivery is sometime this weekend. WTF knows when. We got an email last night saying they anticipate running out of cookies online less than an hour after they start the online sales this evening. Not just running out of the new cookie they hyped and put all that stupid marketing into that is online only, but after that goes either it all shuts down immediately or we may get a few more days with only three, dwindling cookie options - the awful s'mores one, adventurefuls and thin mints.
I feel like the purpose of GS is to teach kids to never, ever, ever get involved with network marketing because you will spend more money than you take in (cookie proceeds are so low in our council they don't even cover the cost of GS uniforms, let alone GS dues. And you can forget about them actually funding a fun activity. When people ask where the money from the sale go, we just honestly answer to the Girl Scouts organization itself. Because every penny does. Even the pittance that comes back to the troop just goes back to the organization to pay for the "privilege" of being a Girl Scout. Even donations barely go to troops.
I posted a similar vent in the Randoms! Kid is super close to her goal and the bakery just decided they are done baking so all we have access to is what is at troop leaders house and what is already at local cookie cupboard. They already shifted her website to shipping only which is ridiculous!
I think that it depends on your council. I am a leader in Atlanta and we have a terrible council and cookies have been a pain in the ass the past two years. It also doesn’t help that there are a million different websites and nothing is integrated. So, like everything, it is regional, lol.
I posted a similar vent in the Randoms! Kid is super close to her goal and the bakery just decided they are done baking so all we have access to is what is at troop leaders house and what is already at local cookie cupboard. They already shifted her website to shipping only which is ridiculous!
Are you able to go into Digital Cookie and manually switch it back to in person delivery?
I posted a similar vent in the Randoms! Kid is super close to her goal and the bakery just decided they are done baking so all we have access to is what is at troop leaders house and what is already at local cookie cupboard. They already shifted her website to shipping only which is ridiculous!
Are you able to go into Digital Cookie and manually switch it back to in person delivery?
My DD isn't selling this year, but from everything I'm hearing from her old troop, cookie season has been a mess this year. No one is meeting their goal because they can't get the inventory to sell.
Not to mention the shipping cost for online sales are $15 for a single, $5 box. (this isn't unique to this year, but something that I always thought was crazy)
I posted a similar vent in the Randoms! Kid is super close to her goal and the bakery just decided they are done baking so all we have access to is what is at troop leaders house and what is already at local cookie cupboard. They already shifted her website to shipping only which is ridiculous!
Our digital cookie starts for the year at 10pm and then might shut down completely for the year by about 11pm (or maybe they'll allow shipping for a few more days on three varieties). Shipping isn't even going to be an option after that.
The bakery is done and we haven't even gotten our initial delivery to the cupboard/troops (Scheduled for this weekend). Booths can't even start before March 20th.
I wish they'd stop pouring money into new cookies, marketing and poorly integrated websites and just focus on sourcing maybe 4-6 cookie varieties that they can actually produce and get to the kids to sell. Is that too much to ask?
Stop doing so many things so very very badly. And stop bullshitting us that your failures some how benefit our kids. (The defensiveness in the spin just makes it worse).
Girl Scout is a notoriously poorly run organization from top to bottom. I honestly don't know how they survive except that new parents with eligible aged kids don't realize it, so it's a steady stream of new members.
I'm not a GS parent, much to DD's annoyance. But I enjoy the cookies. Or enjoyed. Over the last few years, the price has gone up and the quality has gone. My old rule was that I'd never pass a GS without buying a box, but in the last few years, it just hasn't been worth it. I'm glad that the shortage means I won't have to fear disappointing those faces at the grocery store.
I have nothing to do with GS other than buying cookies every year to support friends who sell them, but I 100% agree that the price has gone up so much while the quality has gone down SO much. I still like thin mints, but all the rest of them have just gotten kind of blah, and I don't even bother anymore. And it was annoying that they were so amped about that new flavor and then you couldn't get it from the troops, but had to order online and pay for shipping or something? That's dumb.
Is it optional for GS to sell them or do you have to do it? If your troop isn't even getting much for it, and it's such a PITA, could you just not do it?
My girls both did it in the beginning of elementary school. I hustled MY ass off to sell at work. Girls that sold X amount got to go to camp for free, which my girls had exactly 0 desire to do. They would also do some type of group event to a trampoline park or something as well. The last two years they were in the troop, they didn't schedule the group event for whatever reason. SO the girls got no benefit of being in the top sellers. And they were still accepting checks for cookies and seeing behind the scenes into how many were bad checks made me so angry that when the girls said they weren't super into scouts anymore, I was fine and let them bail.
I had heard the low return to troop for many of GS fundraising efforts & asked if I could just give a direct donation to the troop (bc I do not need cookies or magazines or whatever). I was told there wasn't a way to do that but does anyone know for sure?
It sounds like a lot of effort is put into this hustle & the girls aren't really benefitting from it.
I had heard the low return to troop for many of GS fundraising efforts & asked if I could just give a direct donation to the troop (bc I do not need cookies or magazines or whatever). I was told there wasn't a way to do that but does anyone know for sure?
It sounds like a lot of effort is put into this hustle & the girls aren't really benefitting from it.
I know in Cub Scouts we just took their money and deposited into our account. Many people did not want buy $20 popcorn, but they would give $5. Sometimes they would give $20-50. We said thank you and took it! I assume each troop has their own bank account to deposit it.
I had heard the low return to troop for many of GS fundraising efforts & asked if I could just give a direct donation to the troop (bc I do not need cookies or magazines or whatever). I was told there wasn't a way to do that but does anyone know for sure?
It sounds like a lot of effort is put into this hustle & the girls aren't really benefitting from it.
I know in Cub Scouts we just took their money and deposited into our account. Many people did not want buy $20 popcorn, but they would give $5. Sometimes they would give $20-50. We said thank you and took it! I assume each troop has their own bank account to deposit it.
I am familiar with cub & Boy Scouts as I have one (each) of those. But Girl Scouts is a completely different org.
I had heard the low return to troop for many of GS fundraising efforts & asked if I could just give a direct donation to the troop (bc I do not need cookies or magazines or whatever). I was told there wasn't a way to do that but does anyone know for sure?
It sounds like a lot of effort is put into this hustle & the girls aren't really benefitting from it.
Someone gave me a direct donation for the troop last year (for this same reason), and our leaders did accept it. Not sure if it required any creative accounting on their part.
The exact amount per troop, at least at our council, was dependent on how many boxes the girls sell. The more you sell, the higher the percentage of the sales goes back to the troop. I'm pretty sure that we got $1/box, the cost of baking was around $1/box, and the other $2 was distributed to the higher levels of administration within Girl Scouts. But you could get as little as 60 cents/box. (This year the price went up to $5/box and I don't know how that affected the ratios)
I had heard the low return to troop for many of GS fundraising efforts & asked if I could just give a direct donation to the troop (bc I do not need cookies or magazines or whatever). I was told there wasn't a way to do that but does anyone know for sure?
It sounds like a lot of effort is put into this hustle & the girls aren't really benefitting from it.
Nope. The only donations option is "Care to share" which means you give money which subsidizes what ever left over inventory the council dumps at local foodbanks and military bases. I don't anticipate much excess inventory this year. Troops get a few pennies for every excess box you subsidize.
Don’t get me started. I am a leader for two troops, and I just took on the role of Service Unit Manager in the fall. I try to stay positive in front of the girls, but cookie season is the worst!
Post by bookqueen15 on Mar 7, 2023 13:50:50 GMT -5
In terms of donations, my daughters troop accepted cash donations at cookie booths and I think that money goes directly to the troop but I am not a troop leader so not sure on that. But there isn't a direct to troop donation option online. I think a lot of it is council dependent. We moved out of state this year and it seems things have gone much more smoothly this year in the new council, which I think is one of the largest councils in the country. It sounds like our council was able to get started with selling and distributing cookies earlier than others, so didn't encounter much supply issues until now. But cookies have been available here since mid-January.
It is very disappointing for councils that couldn't get cookies earlier, changes need to be made for next year.
Cookie season is a clusterf*** every year, I would honestly prefer they ditch the online portion of it. Digital Cookie a crappy platform that doesn't really have the funding it needs to be a smoother interface for families and with eBudde, and I think it's really detrimental to what cookie sales' theoretical goal is, i.e. building girls' interpersonal/entrepreneurial/money management skills.
It's shitty that this crap overshadows the good parts of GS in general for a lot of people and pushes volunteers/girls/families out of the organization.
And troops can absolutely take cash or check donations directly at any time, it doesn't need to be linked to official fundraisers (cookies or fall product). Troops aren't even technically required to participate in the official fundraisers; they have to participate if they do want to do other fundraising, but that can be as little as a single item each from cookies and fall product.
You guys are making me feel better about the fact that DD1 doesn't want to do GS. I did Camp Fire as a kid and loved it, I feel like she's missing a great experience.
I was a Girl Scout, dd is not. I find the online only cookies to be completely against the supposed point of the girls selling cookies. It just exposed the truth: that cookie sales have to do with supporting girl scout admin and not the girls themselves.
I will buy directly from girls who we know and ask us personally but that’s it.
It all seems like such a scam.
ETA: the troops in our area get 75 cents a box. That’s it.
I had heard the low return to troop for many of GS fundraising efforts & asked if I could just give a direct donation to the troop (bc I do not need cookies or magazines or whatever). I was told there wasn't a way to do that but does anyone know for sure?
It sounds like a lot of effort is put into this hustle & the girls aren't really benefitting from it.
At the booth sales people did give donations like a "keep the change" kind of thing. The troop leader said it was fine and she will use it for meeting snacks. I don't know if it's against the rules but who cares if it is because the organization sucks at organizing!
I am an experienced GS mom, so I mostly just try to do the minimum and ignore the rest. During Covid, our troop opted out of fundraising and we could just donate, so that was a nice break. Now we are back to normal.
I feel like this year has been worse. We did 2 waves of girl distributed cookies and then they turned on shipped cookies way late. I did my first wave, and I am opting out of the 2nd wave and the shipped cookies. Then DD will do 1 hour of booth sales and call it a day. I think we get $1 a box to my troop which doesn't seem horrible.
I am mad at our council in general for doubling the prices of GS summer camp because the rest of the lower priced years were apparently on the backs of sub par female wages. And now, women can't afford to work for them anymore. Maybe they should have been paying market wage the whole time? And then they could have done annual COL increases for camp rather then just double all of sudden one year.
I got an email a couple of hours ago that there was severe weather in Kentucky over the weekend and certain types from one of the two bakers (Little Brownie Baker) are done for the year. You can now only get Thin Mints, Adventurefuls, and S’mores.
And troops can absolutely take cash or check donations directly at any time, it doesn't need to be linked to official fundraisers
This is actually not allowed in our council. It's in those one million training videos I had to watch. We have to get prior approval to receive or give any donations.
Digital Cookie a crappy platform that doesn't really have the funding it needs to be a smoother interface for families and with eBudde, and I think it's really detrimental to what cookie sales' theoretical goal is, i.e. building girls' interpersonal/entrepreneurial/money management skills.
Yes. Which is why my troops almost exclusively sell in person. I make a troop site so they have something they can send if they absolutely must, but it is awful to coordinate with eBudde.
This stupid raspberry cookie and it's online/direct shipping only sales are the only marketing GS has done around here so I keep getting pushback from the families. And now they won't even be able to buy/sell it online.
I'm very surprised some of you haven't gotten cookies yet. We got our first round of orders on Jan 27th and have had 3 cookie booths already.
It is very annoying that the troop only gets to keep .85 cents per box.
They pushed back our start date almost two months so we wouldn't have supply shortages. And now there are no cookies. And we only keep 80 cents of each box - even though they raised the cost to $6/box.
I'm very surprised some of you haven't gotten cookies yet. We got our first round of orders on Jan 27th and have had 3 cookie booths already.
It is very annoying that the troop only gets to keep .85 cents per box.
They pushed back our start date almost two months so we wouldn't have supply shortages. And now there are no cookies. And we only keep 65 cents of each box - even though they raised the cost to $6/box.
Ours are only $4 a box. Except for S'mores and the Toffee ones. I didn't realize different areas have different prices!