The Girl Alarm System Scouts

Girl Scout Cookies now cost $3.50, and that's pretty expensive for cookies.

For every sale, the scout gets about $0.65. Sure, that’s good money for little kids, but this means we’re paying around $2.85 per box for a few semi-delicious cookies. (Admit it, they’re not that good…) Wouldn’t it make more sense to go to the Dollar Store and buy some peanut butter cookies or cheap “Samoas” for a dollar, then give $2.00 directly to a girl scout sitting outside the store? Yes, it would. In fact, you just saved 50 cents, and the girls just made an extra $1.35 – That, my friends, is called a Pareto superior outcome.

Who gets screwed if we decide to stop buying cookies from girl scouts? The company that produces cookies, that's who. While a portion of your purchase goes to a form of charity, a much, much larger portion goes to the cookie makers. An easy way to look at this, I think, is to imagine the case of direct charity: You give money to a girl scout who sits in a chair outside of a store. That's it - very direct. However, if you place a cookie factory in the middle, the charity then becomes less direct, and clearly more inefficient. I'm not saying selling cookies isn't good - it clearly helps convince some people to donate who otherwise wouldn't. The trick, though, is that if you feel like supporting a charity, or an organization, like the Girl Scouts, then buying cookies wastes your money and reduces the scouts' take in the process.

So, every time you feel like buying cookies from a scout, just give them about $2.00 per box (per box that you would have otherwise purchased). With the extra $1.50, remember to buy crappy cookies at the 99 Cent Store or even Safeway next time you go. Besides, you'll get the cookies faster this way.

If every moderately charitable person that enjoys the idea that "buying cookies helps a good cause" would follow this advice, we'd put an inefficient cookie-making company that operates under the guise of "charity" out of business, we'd make the girl scouts much richer, and we'd have a lot more cookies and we wouldn't have to wait for them. F yeah!

Oh, and don’t forget about the opportunity cost of paranoid mothers sitting in the car staring at you while you’re buying cookies from their daughters at your doorstep. That seems like a big waste of human resources. What we should do, instead, is start a corporation in which both mothers and their daughters go door to door (just like they're doing in the scouts), only instead of using their daughters' cutesy sales ability to sell cookies, we'll have them sell more important and expensive things, like insurance or home security products. Those are the same as cookies, but they require a more complex contract than the one the scouts already have you sign when you buy cookies... That shouldn't be too hard to update...

What?

Did you ask, "What about child labor laws?"

Oh, all right. Fine. We'll call the company "Mother-Daughter Fun Time Relationship and Skill Building Scouts." We'll allow the mother-daughter teams to keep 18.6% of the revenue, provided they spend it on more relationship or skill-building activities like camping and community cleaning (or whatever the hell the Girl Scouts do). There! Child labor laws successfully averted, and we'll make the big bucks selling overpriced, crappy alarm systems!


...instead of cookies...