Girls,
I hope you’re feeling accomplished. If it weren’t for your overwhelmingly adorable little smiles and those goofy little vests, I don’t think I’d be staring at four boxes of cookies right now.
Although, after visiting your website to learn more about the delicious combination of peanut butter and chocolate known to us in the munching biz as the “Tagalong,” I can’t say that I’m surprised with your unnerving business savvy and unmatched skill in the art of the sale.
On the front page, there are flash images of “Thin Mints” and “Trefoils” with captions that read: “This cookie cheers up soldiers in Iraq.” “This cookie helped fund a camp for city kids.” Those are some pretty bold statements; can the cookies back them up?
If I were on the front lines in Baghdad, fighting a war against an unrelenting insurgency, it might take a little bit more than a chocolate cookie to cheer me up. (Like a legitimate exit strategy now that the only real WMD is out of office.)
But seriously, you’re able to evoke as much emotion from your customers as those “you can feed this child for 13 cents a day” commercials, and simultaneously display as much enthusiasm about the product as a used-car salesman. I’m sure you get a lot of envious fan mail from Nicholas Cage’s agent.
I think the pivotal move in this little racket that you gals are running is leaving Mom in the car at the bottom of the stairs.
How would I feel if I had said “No, thanks, I don’t need any cookies today,” thus forcing you to return to the car empty-handed and downtrodden with your failure to move the product? What if your mom was some crazy troop leader, living vicariously through you and your friends?
I don’t think I could live with myself knowing that I was what kept you from obtaining that cookie badge, or from using your earnings for a trip to Disneyland.
The bottom of the website reads “EVERY COOKIE HAS A MISSION: TO HELP GIRLS DO GREAT THINGS.”
I’m glad that I now know the true intentions of this cookie, because up until this point, I thought the mission was simply to avoid uncovered glasses of milk or fuzzy blue puppets who take to cookies like Takeru Kobayashi to hot dogs.
Either way, I’d like to thank you. While these little morsels don’t do much for my “spring break body,” they certainly make the time between breakfast and dinner, and to that end, childhood to adulthood, much more enjoyable.
Your cookies have developed a long-standing reputation, a certain street-cred amongst snack foods, and by not purchasing them we are all doing a disservice to Girl Scouts around the country.
Tell Ben to stop writing about food and get a gym membership by e-mailing him at bkarris@asu.edu
