Today in news nobody ever thought possible: there are millions of dollars’ worth of unsold Girl Scout cookies languishing in an Alpharetta, Georgia warehouse. This sounds like a brilliant premise for a heist movie, one for which I have already started working on a screenplay.
Speaking with local NBC affiliate WXIA’s11Alive News, Girl Scouts of Greater Atlanta CEO Amy Dosik says that more than 720,000 boxes of cookies remain unsold. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, an average of four million boxes were sold each year by Atlanta-area Girl Scout troops, with a large portion of sales coming from door-to-door sales, and cookie booths set up outside of local businesses. This year Girl Scout cookie season was extended by several weeks and moved primarily online to encourage socially distant orders, but it still hasn’t been enough; as it stands, only two and a half million boxes have been sold,reports ABC affiliate WSB-TV.
In all thehungry, hungry hububthat surrounds Girl Scout cookies, the fact that it is first and foremost a charity organization often gets overlooked. The money raised from cookie sales are typically used to help fund community service projects and provide financial assistance to families sending their daughters to Girl Scout camp.
“[One-third] of our families have told us that COVID has impacted the financial things they’re able to do in Girl Scouting,” said Dosik. “What our girls who are doing Girl Scouts this year are telling us is that Girl Scouts is an essential connection to helping them feel a sense of normalcy in a very unusual and challenging year.”
The Girl Scouts of Greater Atlanta has not given up hope of selling these cookies, and is once again extending the sales window. If you’d like to help take a few boxes off their hands, you can place an order through the chapter’sShow Me the Cookieswebsite, which is offering free shipping on all purchases over eight boxes through April 30. The cookies do not expire until September, and can last even longer if frozen. If you’ve ever considered buying a chest freezer for extra storage, the time to pull the trigger on that dream is now.