Welcome back, team! So the holiday season is upon us. "But Alanna!" you scream, spraying your copy of The Miscellany News with unsightly bits of quesadilla, "We just finished with the holiday season! Christmas and New Years and everything! Look, I even have this gift card to Yankee Candle from my senile great-aunt Marcia that I will never ever spend as proof!"
Hush now. You're forgetting about quite possibly the most important event to ever grace the solar calendar, the three-month-long revelry that defines America as we know it: Girl Scout cookie season. The timing varies from year to year and state to state, but generally cookies are sold between January and March and distributed around April. In the olden days, little girls clad in innocent green vests used to go door-to-door peddling their wares to strangers, until the Girl Scouts of America realized that this business model was less than effective in terms of children not getting kidnapped. Now they're encouraged to sell to people they know, utilizing the age-old strategy of "begging your parents to buy lots of something (i.e. cookies, magazine subscriptions, raffle tickets) so that you can get something else (i.e. a merit badge, novelty sunglasses, more raffle tickets)." Some renegade troops have even been known to set up stalls outside grocery stores, selling cookies at a markup in exchange for over-the-counter service—no waiting an arbitrary and agonizing month-and-a-half for Trefoils if you get serviced by Troop 24781!
How do I know all this insider info? Well, not to brag or anything, but I was probably the best cookie salesgirl the Eastern Seaboard has seen in decades. My naturally piercing voice, combined with an early gift for smooth-talking, meant that for the four years I spent in Girl Scouts, I outsold the other members of my troop three-to-one. For two years, my house even served as the illustrious Cookie House, wherein all the orders in my town were stored until the other Girl Scouts came to pick them up. Basically, I ran shit. Think you're not interested in forking over 20 bucks for a six-pack of Samoas because of your "coconut allergy" or "type-2 diabetes?" Wrong.
Truth be told, I wasn't really more convincing than any of the other pigtailed entrepreneurs; my secret weapon was my dad. He works in a huge office in downtown Boston, and every year I'd send him off with the cookie order form. Once word got out among the sugar-starved tax consultants that Barry Okun was the guy to see for Thin Mints and Peanut Butter Patties (I WILL NEVER CALL THEM TAGALONGS YOU FASCIST COMMIE SLUTS), all we had to do was sit back and watch the requests pour in. I was the bucktoothiest little kingpin you ever did see.
I quit the troop when I realized that my total lack of coordination seriously hampered my chances at the juiciest merit badges. I don't know any Girl Scouts anymore; most of my friends' younger siblings are too young/old/pierced to belong to the organization, and I passed the benchmark where it's okay to have tweenage friends a whole bunch of years ago. I interviewed (selflessly, journalistically, and with no ulterior motive) my 13-year-old brother to find out if any of his shrieky, bebrace'd lady-friends might be hawking cookies this year. His response: "What? [Girl Scouts] still exist?" Homeboy makes a fair point—how does an organization stay in business if its product is only available on a who-you-know basis, especially when the "who" in question is required to wear polyester vests made of the least flattering green to ever grace this good Earth? I guess it's just one of life's great mysteries, like why that tree outside the Retreat smells like feta cheese and where jeggings come from. And so my quest for cookie nirvana continues.
Editor's Note: I have since located a small child who is willing to peddle me two boxes of Peanut Butter Patties, two boxes of Thin Mints and one box of Samoas. AND NONE OF YOU CAN HAVE ANY HAHA.
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