How many cookies for a GS cookie booth?
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Anonymous
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This year Girl Scouts are now allowed to have their own cookie booth. My dd is beyond excited for this (door to door with no actual cookies just doing preorders is awful and no one opens their doors). We have a corner lot and she will sit out with a booth to sell.
Anyone have any ideas of how to make this happen? I have to order and prepay for all of my cookies myself beforehand and I have to eat the losses. Last year I ordered 2 cases of thin mints and a few other favorites for her to go door to door, but it wasn’t near enough. Would it be weird if she had only thin mints for sale? I worry about getting cookies people don’t want. I wish Girl Scouts would just provide me with a variety. She’d sell hundreds if it was like when I was a girl. Thin mints, samoas and Tagalongs (peanut butter patties)? |
Anonymous
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We don't know how busy your neighborhood is so its hard to say. You can't go wrong with Thin Mints and Samoas, I used to be our troops money manager and those sold the most.
Just so you know, GS prefers A Home Cookie Booth to be called a "Cookie Stand". Some councils require submitting a specific "Private Property" or "Cookie Stand" form if you do this at your home. If there's anyone weird in your neighborhood they could report you, but I would hope not. |
Anonymous
| Ugh. How about none? No one wants your overpriced, unhealthy cookies. I do hope RFKJr ends these dumb events. |
Anonymous
DP- I hear you and hate how terrible they are for you, but the girls learn so much from these booths. Money handling, budgeting, marketing, customer service, inventory and more. |
Anonymous
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Op here. Neighborhood is a typical suburban sfh neighborhood. Not insanely busy but everyone is kind and buys several usually.
I won’t call it a booth or a stand. We were told it’s being allowed just this year. |
Anonymous
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This year has to be a learning year. I’m thinking of my typical suburban sfh neighborhood and i just couldn’t imagine getting a lot of traffic.
maybe 2 boxes of thin mints and 1 box each of samoas and tagalongs? just do you can get an idea of traffic? how many of these are you allowed to have? |
Anonymous
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I spent many years selling GS cookies, then 8 years as a leader. Our selling period was one month. We were allowed to exchange full cartons until the 3rd week. My goal was to enter the 3rd and 4th week with only Thin Mints and Samoas/Carmel deLites. If I had a booth in the last 2 weeks, I would sell out as long as I only had mints and Samoas/CdLs.
My box numbers for the entrance to a busy grocery were at least 100 per entrance for 3 hours. If I had 4 adults and 4 scouts, we would divide up into 2 tables for the 2 entrances and would easily sell 200-250 boxes. If only 1 entrance, 100-125 boxes. This was weekend booths, Fri afternoon, anytime Saturday and Sunday until 3pm. Outside those hours, sales dropped. Lowes or Home Depot - same sales on Saturday morning or early afternoon (a 3hr block between 9am and 3pm) and Sunday 12-3pm. One entrance = 100-125 boxes. Sometimes we got a booth like a drugstore or a discount grocery. We might be lucky to sell 50 boxes over 3 hours. So if you have a booth that you think will get heavy traffic AND you can sell the first 2 weekends (before people buy from neighbors and co-workers), I would order ~100 boxes for each 3 hour period. Of those, I would get 5 cases Mints (60), 3 cases Samoas/CdL (36) and 1 case Tagalong/PNB Patties (12). If you can man that booth Fri, Sat and Sun, order 3x that amount, especially if you can do the booth the next weekend. If you end up selling double what you expected on Friday, then call the troop cookie mom on Saturday and order extra. If you undersell on the first weekend, hopefully you can do the booth the next weekend and finish selling whatever you ordered for the first weekend. If you think it's a slow location, order half of the above numbers. Sometimes, within a troop or service unit, you can trade or transfer cartons. If your booths undersell, by the 3rd week, other troops may be desperate for mints and the popular Samoas/Cdl or Tagalongs/PNG Patties. So if you have extra full cartons, you can give them to another seller or troop, and get full credit back (instead of having to take a carton of Trefoils for a carton of mints). Bottom line, just sell the 3 most popular flavors to minimize the risk of ending up with unsold cookies. Majority mint, then the above recs for the coconut and PNB flavors. |
Anonymous
| 8 yr GS leader here - if you are saying the "stand" is in your neighborhood at the end of your driveway or at the neighborhood entrance, well, maybe figure you will sell 25 boxes over a few hours at best? So either go door to door and presell, or order several cartons of mints and 2 cartons of Samoas/CdL and hope for the best. |
Anonymous
| One idea to have a donation jar, where if people do not want to take the cookies home they can donate. There’s no reason that those donations can’t cover the cost of the box of cookies and then you can later Donate the boxes “donated” at your local food bank. Yes they take them! |
Anonymous
As for donations, our service unit didn't allow them unless they were "Cookies for the Troops" and we were giving/sending the boxes to the military. That was a great way to get extra profits from people who didn't want cookies, but wanted to help the GS troop. At first, I had to mail the cookies myself to an overseas address, but eventually my GS unit handled that for us. We were not supposed to accept cash donations meant for our troop, but many troops ignored this rule and even put a donation box out. IMO, if people donate cash and you convert that into boxes to donate to the food bank, I'm fine with that. |
Anonymous
That’s a lovely idea. |
Anonymous
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You can’t just put out a donation jar. You aren’t allowed to solicit donations. If people offer donations, you can take them for the troop. In addition, your troop should have a designated recipient for donated boxes and you can solicit people to buy boxes for that donation site (often a hospital, food bank or U.S. troops).
Private stands have always been allowed so I don’t know what’s new here. Another good way is to leave door hangers with your information since so few people open the door. Generally speaking, we figure the following proportion — 40% thin mints, 10% tagalogs, 20% trefoils and 20% Samoas (round up for Samoas) Your service unit should have a site where troops can swap cookies if they have extra from booth sales. But I wouldn’t buy too much for this purpose. Is your troop not doing regular booth sales? |
Anonymous
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Op here. Troop is doing regular booth sales too at grocery stores but they don’t count towards how many cookies each girl sells. We don’t have jobs that we can sell Girl Scout cookies at so my dd always has the lowest amount of cookies sold despite working the grocery store booths every week.
This was helpful-especially the mom who posted the percentages. And no, we weren’t allowed to sell out of our own stands before. This is new for our troop (we’re in national cap region but idk if it’s region wide?). People used to tell dd to come back and sell when she had cookies in hand, but she never did. It was just door to door pre sells. |
Anonymous
| Where are you with those cookies!!! I haven’t seen any for sale yet anywhere |
Anonymous
In the DC area booths start in February. |