In The Future

It’s that time of the year again. Only this year, instead of just buying a few boxes at the door, we have a Girl Scout sales agent living under our roof, and the kitchen in filled with boxes of these cookies. For every person that we can’t find to complete their purchase, Mommy and Daddy are buying another box.

But they’re high-quality cookies, seemingly made with better ingredients than your standard supermarket cookie. They compare favorably with Pepperidge Farms or Peek Freans, which are like Pepperidge Farms, but for Britains and Canadians. And it makes sense that they would be high-quality cookies, they only get one time a year to make an impression. But more importantly, they get to bypass much of the overhead of conventional cookie companies. They can use a skeletal distribution network and marketing network, because Girl Scouts has tapped into the one of the most powerful marketing networks the world has ever known … millions of girls.

I am a physicist, so I did a little mental calculation of how many sales they see in a year, I came up with $75 milion a year. Then when I wrote this entry, I decided to Google it. I wasn’t even close, actually off by a factor of ten. Actually, Girl Scout Cookies are the number one brand of cookies in the country, annual sales $700 million. Since they seem to be receptive to market demands, like getting rid of trans-fats, I predict they will hit $1 billion in annual sales before 2015.

The nature of Girl Scout cookies has changed over the years, obviously they originally started as home-baked cookies, and then went to factory-made. But over the years, parents have been less willing to let their daughters roam around the neighborhood, and now cookie stands are set up in front of local stores and schools. Thin Mints are still around, but so are several new kinds, one of the most interesting to me is one called “Thanks a Lots”. Each cookie has “Thank you” embossed into the cookie in a different language, including Hindi, French, Spanish and some other languages I don’t recognize.

But the soul of the Girl Scout Cookie empire has remained unchanged since 1934. Namely, an army of bubbly, happy, cute girls roam the planet forcing buyers to agree to purchase several boxes of these things at some later date. I have met people who can turn down a Girl Scout with a cookie order form, but I am not one of these people. And I can perhaps imagine a theortically more efficient sales force, but it would be tought and market-specific. Perhaps it would be easier to sell to daddies if the sales force were NFL cheerleaders wearing beer hats. Perhaps it would be easier to sell to mothers if the sales force were their best-friends with a bottle of Champagne. Perhaps it would be easier to sell to grandparents if the sales force were Tony Danza clones or cops. But the end result is that for vast and nearly universal market penetration, it’s tough to improve upon an eight-something-year-old girl.

And when you consider the job responsibilities that these girls hold the equivalent overhead is staggering. I estimate a ratio of one full-time adult worker to four Girl Scouts. So there are about 3 million Girl Scouts in the U.S.A. alone. (Compare that to Mary Kay Cosmetics, with about ‘only’ 850,000 in the entire world!) That correlates to an adult cookies sales and distribution network of about 3/4 million people. This dwarfs the sales and distribution forces of any food company in the world.

Talk about ‘Girl Power’!

So what is the future of Girl Scout cookies? Clearly, organizations like the Girl Scouts will continue to need funding, and they will continue to ambitiously expand their reach. It would be a mistake to think that the Girl Scout leaders, from the troop leaders up to the National leaders would do anything OTHER than expand their cookie sales, because they have been expanding it since 1934. And in fact, the Girl Scouts now sell nuts and dried fruit part of the year … with all of health-conscious people in the world, this program seems bound to rise.

Does anyone doubt that at least once Girl Scout National leadership has not had a conference about other things that they can have their Scouts sell? Shampoo and lip balm? Dehydrated soup? Herbal teas? I am sure some of these have been considered, and apparently, there is still a contingent in the National leadership that has not yet deluded themselves into thinking that it is a good thing to turn all of their Scouts into full-time sales agents for their marketing machine. Certainly, if they did so the sales efficacy would go down.

It does seem reasonable to me that their late Autumn nut campaign will expand to include the healthier products like tea bags, dried fruit, natural energy bars and the like. I think they wouldn’t have a problem with two big sales pushes each year, and they may have reached market saturation with the cookies anyway … there are always going to be people who just don’t want tasty cookies, but will be more than willing to shell out dough for trail mix.

In all of this though, the obvious question remains … is it really a GOOD thing to have girls use up a solid chunk of their youth selling things to strangers and family? Girl Scout Leadership definitely thinks so, the cookie boxes are covered in inspirational pictures and phrases of the “Courage, Confidence and Character” ilk. From these boxes, the implication is that every girl who foolishly turns away from Girl Scouts and cookie sales is going to grow into a cowardly, shy and characterless adult. The poor child that is more interested in reading books in her treehouse or playing with her dog, rather than holding hands with other Girl Scouts and jumping off of a small hill is doomed for life we are told.

But part of being a futurist is making peace with the future. And the future, like it or not, is one where Sales is the engine of progress. The future will be one full of Girl Scouts and one of Girl Scouts selling their products. Of this we can be sure. The market will expand, and their alternative market will grow to gradually compete with conventional markets. It has already become so. Certainly the parent that buys four boxes of Thin Mints in front of the Walmart is not going to buy any more cookies inside of the store. And while I am sure Walmart is less than happy about this arrangement, they wouldn’t dare shoo away all of those Scout leaders and parents, for fear of angering potential Target or K-Mart customers. But at the same time, it is very conceivable that Walmart will not allow the Girl Scouts to sell nuts and dried fruit in the Autumn, after all enough is enough, right?

But no matter. As a species, girls have access to just about any place on Earth. I am sure that if a girl’s mommy is an engineer at NASA, then on the way to the Space Shuttle, an astronaut will be presented with the dreaded clipboard by some dangerously adorable seven-year-old wearing a tiger-print t-shirt. Girls have access to sales venues for which any multinational would give up their rich corinthian leather.

IN THE FUTURE, expect to see a lot of girls selling you things you only partially want, yet you will be powerless to resist.

LINKS

Official Girl Scout line

Andy Rooney deconstructs the Girl Scout Cookie

70,000 boxes of Girl Scout Cookies sold by one girl

Good New York Times article on the subject