Girl Scouts learn ins, out on selling cookies

Cookie-selling season has started and Maricopa Girl Scouts kicked the event off Friday with a rally and lessons in selling the goodies.

“The Cookie Rally gets the girls excited about selling cookies and informs the new girls to get them riled up and ready to sell,” said Tina Davis, who is mom of two Girl Scouts and helped organize the event.

The girls rotated through four different stations where they learned something different about cookies and the selling process.

At the first station, the girls used markers to decorate elastic zipper-pulls to use on their backpacks, coats, purses or anything else with a zipper.

“The zipper-pulls represent their goals of how many boxes they want to sell,” Davis said.

Cadette Girl Scout Andrea Cooper said she wants to sell more boxes of cookies than she did last year.

“My goal is 400 boxes because last year I sold 300,” Cooper said.

Last year, Cooper sold 132 boxes to her neighbor who sent some to his family out of state. She said she hopes he does the same thing this year.

At the second station the girls sampled cookies and painted their nails with the color of the box of their favorite cookie.

“My favorite activity was tasting the cookies,” Cooper said.

She said her favorites are Tagalongs.

The girls decorated clipboards at the third station to give their buyers something to write on, and learned the Samoas song and dance at the fourth station, Davis said.

Pre-sales began Saturday morning, Davis said. The cookies will arrive in mid-February and booths will run Feb. 16 through March 17.

“We will have booths at Bashas’, Fry’s, Walmart, Ace and CVS,” she said. “Hopefully we’ll have booths at Blockbuster, Walgreens and the entertainment center.”

This year, however, some stores will take turns hosting booths, parent volunteer Patti Coutré said.

“In the past, we’ve had booths simultaneously at Bashas’ and Fry’s,” Coutré said. “This year, one store is going to have it the first three weeks and the other store the last three weeks.”

Coutré also said some troops will have credit card capability at their booths.