Tough Cookies : Girl Scout Moms and Dads Drafted for Escalating Sale Wars at Work

The gate is up. The race is on. Halfway into the annual Girl Scout Cookie sales, the pressure is intense.

But the smart cookies have figured out the winning strategy--place the bets on mom and dad.

As neighborhoods become less neighborly, and as more parents combine work and family, customers are just as likely to see grown-ups in suits going desk to desk as Girl Scouts in crisp uniforms and bobby sox going door to door.

Because the stakes here are so high--annual sales determine individual troops’ yearly budgets and prizes for the Scouts--parents have developed high-tech sales strategies, producing treacherous office politics and resentment among competitive co-workers.

The whole situation has brought yet more crises of conscience for working parents.

Last year, for instance, Ralph Turner sold close to 100 boxes at his construction company for his granddaughter Heather Ann, 7, of Irvine. “The only problem I could see,” said her mother, Tanya, “was my daughter got kind of snotty that she had sold a lot and the others didn’t.

“We had to explain, ‘You didn’t sell them yourself.’ ”

Most parents circulate order forms, but some parents are said to be using fax machines to take orders.

So many parents are in the market that, as one father explained, “there’s plenty of guilt to go around if you don’t do something for your own precious, golden child.” Others say that colleagues ask them to sell the cookies at work: “They want the (bleeping) things,” said a father of two.

In the captive office market, cookie politics can be serious.

Consider this single mother of a 6-year-old Brownie, who requested anonymity for fear that possible reprisals from competitors in the cookie trade would hurt her daughter’s troop.

About two weeks ago, the woman embarked on her first effort to help her daughter sell cookies. She sent out what she thought was a friendly E-mail computer message to co-workers at her Irvine-based firm. It began: “Well, folks, it’s that time of year again . . . “ and sought orders for the $2.50-a-box Tagalongs, Thin Mints, Samoas and the other standard Girl Scout cookies. (This year, a new, health-foodish Trail Mix variety is offered.)

“I was just trying to get enough cookies sold so she could earn her badge and a charm. I don’t have the luxury of taking her out to sell cookies,” she said. She had sold about 60 boxes when two Girl Scout dads in the office pointed out she had jumped the official start date by a week.

The dads--”influential people” who until this year had dominated the office Girl Scout Cookie market--took her aside. “They didn’t say they would report me to the Girl Scout Council, but they made it seem as if they would,” she said.

Eventually, one father went to the personnel office, which decreed that from then on all employees would pool their Girl Scout cookie orders and divide the proceeds evenly.

Girl Scout officials say such stories are not common but serve to illustrate how changing families and neighborhoods have altered the sweetest of American institutions.

“Long ago, the streets were safer and the little girls used to go around in neighborhoods. Those were the halcyon days when everybody was home,” said Cece Sander, director of product sales for the Orange County council.

Now, an increasing number of Girl Scouts are in single-parent homes and about 85% of the 1,245 troop leaders work outside the home.

“The workplace has become in many cases a substitute for the prior activity. One, it’s safer, and two, it’s more effective,” Sander said.

Meanwhile co-workers complain--not only about the competition, but also about pressure when cookie-selling kids are brought to their desk, particularly by bosses.

Some companies, concerned that the sales are too distracting, time-consuming or political have banned parental solicitation altogether. But others, Sander said, have embraced it. “It has come to the point where we receive calls from offices” that have no access to Girl Scouts or their parents and ask for order forms, she said.

The result, she said is “a large business. A very large business.”

Indeed, there is big dough involved. Last year, 165 million boxes of Girl Scout Cookies were sold. Orange County’s 22,000 Girl Scouts accounted for $1.75 million in sales. The local troops net 20% of their sales with about 35% going to the council, and the balance to the cookie franchisers.

In addition to being able to finance special trips, the girls can win a badge for selling 45 boxes, a charm for 85, and camp discounts for 200, 250 or 300 boxes.

“It definitely does help to have a place of business to sell,” said Sandy Hoyle, service unit chairwoman for East Fullerton. The girls, whose parents work at Hughes, do particularly well, she said. Doctors and nurses, with access to larger numbers of co-workersdo better than lawyers, who have more limited contacts.

Hoyle’s husband, Bruce, a family physician, usually sells about 75 boxes a year at Placentia Linda Community Hospital where he tacks up order forms every other day for one of his two daughters during the two-week sale that ends Feb. 10. “I sell to my partner and the girls in the office. When I make rounds at the hospital, you try and hit up the nurses.”

Last year, he said, he had competition from a critical-care doctor. “By the time I got to the CCU, they said Dr. So-and-So has already been around. We feel obligated to support him. You say, ‘OK, I understand that.’ ”

Some Scout leaders, such as Aileen Baker of Yorba Linda, said they encourage girls to sell most of the cookies themselves. “It’s good for them to learn how business works. It’s to their benefit.”

In Newport Beach, half the girls still sell door to door, said cookie chairman Barb Pollack. For the rest, he explained, cookie sale time means, “Hand it over to Dad and say, ‘Take it.’ ”

But that doesn’t always settle it.

After the Brownie mother’s company sent out the final message ordering employees to pool their sales, “some people got suspicious,” she said.

“They approached me. I was embarrassed. A few people said, ‘I didn’t want to buy cookies from so and so. I wanted to buy them to benefit your daughter. Not theirs.’ They got upset. Some said, ‘I want to cancel my order.’ ”

Already floored by the Byzantine pettiness in her first exposure to cookie sales, a veteran competitor told her: “If you think this is bad, wait until Little League.”

Someday, it may seem as if that was just the way the cookie crumbles, but as for now, she said:

“The whole thing has put a bad taste in my mouth.”