It’s Girl Scout Cookie time — with two new choices
DANIEL CLIFTON • PICAYUNE EDITOR
MARBLE FALLS — If you’ve been craving the legendary Thin Mints or Samoas, the wait ends Jan. 21 as the annual Girl Scout Cookie sales crank up and roll on through Feb. 28.
“We still have all the favorites,” said Danielle Quist of the Girl Scouts of Central Texas. “Plus, we’ve added a couple new ones: the Rah-Rah Raisins and a new gluten-free cookie, the Toffee-tastic.”
At the Marble Falls Scout Hut in Johnson Park on Jan. 17, members of the Marble Falls Girls Scouts gathered to rev up for the annual sales. The leaders already had doled out the 800 boxes of cookies (that’s about 9,600 cookies hitting Marble Falls streets), but now it was time to get the girls excited about the task at hand.
Michelle Radford, a service unit director and Marble Falls cookie coordinator (what a great title to have on a business card), used the meeting as a chance to not only motivate the girls but also remind them of safety precautions as they begin selling this month.
“We have about 50 girls selling cookies (from the Marble Falls unit) this year,” Radford said. “One of the things we want to do through this training is certainly have fun but also make sure the girls have set goals and have begun looking at their cookie sales and how they want to do it.”
While the cookie sales serve as a major fundraiser of the organization and the local Girl Scouts, Radford pointed out there is much more at work when it comes to the annual event.
“The girls learn and develop a tremendous number of skills, from learning how to interact with people of all ages and backgrounds to setting goals,” Radford said. “They develop a lot of self-confidence.”
And while the crux of the program is “sales,” what the girls learn carries over into other parts of their lives. They learn how to make public presentations in both individual and group settings. They learn the importance of setting goals, and not just lofty, pie-in-the-sky ones, but attainable ones. Once they set goals, they learn how to work toward those goals through a series of incremental ones with feedback and course correction along the way,
“I look at my oldest daughter, who sold more than one thousand boxes for three years in a row, and see how much she grew and learned during that time,” Radford said. “It looks so simple, just selling cookies, but the girls grow so much from it and from the things it allows them to do in the Girl Scouts.”
The cookies go on sale Jan. 21, but the local Girl Scouts will have booths set up around the area each weekend through February. Cookies are $4 a box, Radford said. The new gluten-free variety, Toffee-tastic, is a more limited release, so Radford recommended people interested in it should get out as soon as sales begin to buy a box or two.
To find a cookie seller or a cookie booth near you, go to www.gsctx.org, click on the “Cookies” button at the top of the page and then click on “Find Cookies” on the left side of the page. You can also download the official Girl Scout Cookie Finder application through the Apple App Store or Google Play for Android devices.
daniel@thepicayune.com