For those of you at the beginning Girl Scout cookie sales

Lol! We start selling on Monday.

we just did booth sales all 13 yrs of GS. in 1st grade, my kids did well for 15 minutes and 90 minutes respectively. short time, practice change, practice asking. every year, their skills improved and we did more booths. learned how important it was to have a goal..know what that goal is and then learned how to deal with rejections and objections...I remembering people who used to complain about the transfat 20 yrs ago..when no one else knew what it was. by the time they were seniors in high school. they sold every day after school, all day weekends, had goals and quit the minute they reached the goal. they hated selling cookies at that point, but they were good at it!!! asked everyone to buy, smiled when tired, did not give up and really spent that money carefully.

12 yrs of sales went on their resume...and it was helpful in job searches. it can be a pain for the parents (we never could sell at dh's work...we couldn't even go to the parking lot). so it was on their own. I found the learning part of it was really really good. they funded a week long car camping trip, a 2 week trip to New Zealand, and a trip to washington dc for a big GS singalong.

We got all our cookie info this past Monday...DD's first year seeking (we joined after sales last year). She's excited...me, not as much

Good luck everyone. We don't start until Feb, booth sales in late March. This is our 8th year selling. My DD is a freshman in HS. For the past 3 years she's sold just over 1000 boxes. I think her goal is about the same this year. She doesn't want to sell during Spring Break this year though so that may cost a few sales.

Our council has the scholarship program where at 7th grade they they start accumulating money towards scholarships. They have to sell at least1500 boxes between 7-12 grades and they earn .50 per box. There is no limit. The kicker is they have to sell at least one box per year during that time (once they reach that goal) to stay eligible to receive the scholarship. My DD sees that as free money and doesn't understand why her troop mates don't set higher goals to get free money!

I dread cookie season. Luckily it's only once a year and I only have a few years left. I'm all about booth sales, I hate bugging the same family and friends year after year, I'd rather beg strangers, lol

ask every person at a booth. smile. say thank you if they say no. I think booths are easier..and if you sign up for several...then one bad weather day won't hurt. keep times appropriate for age...1-1.5 hours for brownies. count money and boxes into a sale and out of a sale..but if you are off 1 or 2 bucks, don't sweat it. signs at booths are good. sell in front of hardware stores on saturdays...

all councils run their own sales..so incentives can be different by council.

My dd is an ambassador. She stopped selling a couple years ago because she hated doing it in the winter. I have completely stopped buying them because they are smaller, fewer in the box and just not worth the money. The girls get so little for all that work.

All you all need to check out Melissa Mcarthy new movie , The Boss. I think it comes out in April....check out the preview.

I'm so glad DD isn't in GS this year! Totally hated cookie time...her troop never wanted to do booths, and there were so many scouts in our neighborhood that door-to-door didn't work, DH usually wasn't working in a traditional office, and I don't work - so we had a hard, hard time. Also, we were in a council where you had to buy the cookies first, so we'd have boxes of cookies sitting around, and DS has a sugar sneaking problem. We'd always end up "eating it" on a bunch of boxes because of that. And then last year, some cleaning people we had actually took the envelope with what little money we HAD earned. I ended up out of pocket over $100, when all I had gotten from it personally was one single box of thin mints. Oh, and for 2 years in a row our troop treasurer screwed up on getting the bank accounts done, so our troop lost out on the bonus cookie profits. (In our council, each troop gets about 40 cents per box, and if you get your annual bank account info in on time, it's essentially doubled. We ended up as a troop only making the 40 cents.) I swore after last year that if DD stayed in GS that I was just going to write a donation to the troop - it would have cost me less AND the troop would have benefited more.

Did I mention how glad I am not to deal with this again???

I'm in WA and our council won't let us sell in front of pot stores. We can't sell in front of liquor stores or bars either.

My granddaughter called this morning and I ordered my boxes