COVID-19 crumbles Girl Scout cookie sales

Slowed sales have left 720,000 boxes unclaimed,

In past years, after North Georgia Girl Scouts finished up yearly cookie sales, there were never leftovers. But this isn’t a normal year. With the pandemic, there was little door-to-door knocking, fewer cookie booths set up in shopping centers and no sign-up sheets passed around offices. The slowed sales have left 720,000 boxes of Tagalongs, Do-siDos, Somoas and, yes, even Thin Mints sitting in Atlanta-area warehouses.

That’s enough boxes to circle I-285, said Amy Dosik, CEO of the Girl Scouts of Greater Atlanta.

“I know. I measured it,” she said, and then did the math to show 720,000 7-inch boxes would circle the 64 miles and then some of the Atlanta loop.

The cookies fund Girl Scout activities, including scholarships for needy families, so the organization is making a last push. It hopes the huge leftovers will still be snapped up online at showmethecookies.com, after extending the sales deadline one month to the end of April.

There was some trepidation as the sales kickoff date of Jan. 1 came because of the pandemic. Not only that, but with many residents locked down or schooling at home, the organization wasn’t able to do its yearly recruiting of new members, so their numbers dipped a bit.

Fewer sales mean fewer of the

36,000 scouts in North Georgia will get to go to camp or events, and fewer families in need will get their children into local troops via scholarship.

Troops get to keep 17% of everything sold. At the typical $4 to $6 a box times the typical 4 million boxes sold in the region, that amounts to between $2.7 million and $4.1 million.

The girls did push online sales to keep the goodies flowing. But even the million boxes sold — a 150% increase over last year’s online sales — didn’t offset the losses in face-to-face sales, Dosik said.

Local troops still get the money for the final sales, as orders are assigned to troops in the buyer’s ZIP code.

The Girl Scouts hope companies will order them and give them away as gifts, families will order more, or people will order them and donate them to local organizations — there’s free shipping for eight or more boxes. “Remember, those freeze,” Dosik said. “You don’t have to eat them all at one time.”

COURTESY A warehouse worker checks a load of Girl Scout cookies for loading into a warehouse in metro Atlanta.