Girl Scout cookies now making bid for sales on eBay

By Julia Moskin
The New York Times

	ROD AYDELOTE / AP Girl Scouts, from left, Lauren Edwards, Rachel Edwards and Sabrina Beard sell cookies at Super Wal-Mart in Bellmead, Texas.
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The cookies are coming — or are they?

After a long winter of taking orders for cookies, girls in the 2.9 million-member Girl Scouts organization have been delivering them this month. A similar frenzy of activity last year made the Scouts' leading seller, Thin Mints, the third-best-selling cookie in the United States, behind Oreos and Chips Ahoy.

For some Americans, though, Girl Scout cookies are difficult to find. Some areas of the country have higher concentrations of Girl Scouts than others, and the Girl Scout gap means that the cookies are available unevenly.

It was perhaps inevitable, then, that they would show up on eBay, the online-auction site.

Steven Mellor, a Bay Area software developer, bought 12 boxes of Thin Mints from a seller in Houston on Wednesday. "I missed the one day the Girl Scouts were at the hardware store in Oakland," he said. "And I never saw another Girl Scout after that."

Of course, the market works both ways. A scarcity of Girl Scout cookies is unimaginable to Laurie Super of Downingtown, Pa., who has delivered 80 boxes of them with her daughter, Taylor, 10.

Not everyone who orders cookies takes them, said Super, 38. Faced with a surplus — two boxes of Caramel deLites and one box of Piñatas — she put them on eBay as a single lot, where they sold at a 66 percent profit.

Auctioning cookies on eBay is not what the organization's leadership has in mind for Girl Scouts, who are supposed to learn social skills and confidence from the experience. "Everyone thinks about the cookies and the money," said Michele Riggio, a spokeswoman for the New York-based organization. "But cookies are an activity first and foremost."

Girl Scout policy prohibits online cookie sales, Riggio said, and cookies are not for sale on the organization's Web site. But hundreds of boxes were available on eBay last week. Most were cookies that sellers had bought from local troops.

Said Hani Durzy, an eBay spokesman: "As far as eBay is concerned, these cookies are private property. We are not going to ban people from reselling them." He added that employees in eBay's corporate offices in San Jose, Calif., were "up to their ears in cookies."
 
Girl Scout cookies are big business in the United States. More than 200 million boxes were sold last year, netting about $400 million. But by any business standard, the sales and distribution model for Girl Scout cookies seems wildly inefficient.

The Girl Scouts are divided into 315 regional councils. Each council sets its schedule and pricing and selling policies, and even the names of the cookies can vary. Cookies sold in Seattle for $3 a box this year; they were $2.50 in Cincinnati, $3.50 in New York, $4 in Tucson, Ariz.

Girl Scouts have about a month to take orders, traditionally by selling door-to-door and in booths at local civic events such as school plays and county fairs.

"But it's getting harder to sell," said Super, who was a Girl Scout for 10 years. "Girls can't go door-to-door without an adult these days. Our local Wawa stores said that they couldn't let the girls set up their booth anymore, because of liability issues. And the schools are already sending the kids out selling all the time."

Still, she said, she sees the need for the prohibition on Internet sales. If individual Girl Scouts were allowed to sell cookies online, she said, there would be "a national free-for-all."

Many eBay sellers are Web-savvy parents who are determined to reach the national market for Girl Scout cookies, even if it means circumventing the organization's rules.

Carrie Nelson, who posted an auction sale for Girl Scout cookies on eBay last Sunday, lives in Drummond, Wis., where, she said, "you can't throw a rock without hitting a Girl Scout."

She has four daughters; the third, Anna, is 8 years old and a member of Troop 45 of the Northern Pines Council. "There are just too many Girl Scouts per customer here," said Nelson, a software developer, who, like her husband, is disabled. "And it's not fair to my daughter that her parents can't take her out selling."

Nelson said that Anna came up with the idea of selling cookies on eBay. Nelson searched the official Girl Scout literature for a loophole in the no-online-sales policy.

Her solution was to auction, for 50 cents each, unofficial order forms for Girl Scout cookies. "We're not selling the cookies," she said. "Just the information on how to buy them."

Lou Berger of Centennial, Colo., has sold 113 boxes (mostly Lemon Coolers and Double Dutch chocolate chocolate-chip, this year's new varieties) on eBay this month; his daughter Emily, 8, is a Girl Scout.

"It started with 14 boxes that I bought and paid for, but wasn't going to eat," he said. "I figured I could resell them and give the profits to Emily's troop as a donation."

But as the thriving Internet trade in contraband cookies suggests, the cult of the cookies will not be uprooted easily.

Super says that when her lot of three boxes sold for $15 Tuesday night, almost twice what she paid (the going rate in Downingtown is $3 a box), she began to suffer twinges of seller's remorse.

And when she also received a stern e-mail message from an anonymous troop leader, warning her that the national leadership frowned on Internet transactions, she contacted the buyer and returned the money.

"I felt that I wouldn't be able to look my daughter in the eye," Super said, "and that next year, she would be able to say: 'Mom, I don't feel like going door-to-door. Let's just sell them all on eBay.' "

Seattle Times staff contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company