Why it’s important for Girl Scout cookies to be sold online

Girl Scout cookies going digital

Whether you parent a Girl Scout and are forced every year to stand out in the cold in front of CVS with your kid or go door to door, OR you’re someone that can’t seem to track down a Girl Scout when you need your Thin Mints fix, you should know that sales are going digital.

The Scouts organization has long debated offering online sales as an option for their members, but in a changing world, they’ll be able to do just that through personalized websites and through mobile apps, according to The AP. All it takes is permission from their guardians and their scout councils.

Many took to the airwaves today to lament the death of direct sales, and the valuable business lessons offered through the experience. One commentator criticized the process, asserting that if someone famous like her were to share a family member’s link, that Scout would be given an extremely unfair advantage.

That unfair advantage is the point

The commentator is exactly right – finding relevant people online to share a link to your site is a more timely business lesson than how to tell if someone’s home at dusk.

Children will naturally learn the value of identifying influencers within their lives, how to use social media to expand their sales empire, and how to use the videos on their individual sites to explain why buyers should cough up their dough.

Doesn’t that sound like exactly the lessons most businesses have spent the last seven years trying desperately to perfect?

The days of annoying parents in your office doing the rounds collecting cash, and the most connected mom in the office dominating Scout sales are over. Watch for Scouts to get creative in using the web to spot influencers, their favorite celebrities, their semi-famous aunt news commentators, their Instagram-famous cousin, and so forth to get involved.

Good for the Scouts – here’s what we must acknowledge

I grew up as a Scout in tiny Buda, Texas, with a single Dad who worked at a small business with a handful of employees, and our nearest neighbor was over a mile away, and the next nearest was two miles away. I didn’t exactly have the advantage that my Scout bestie, Stacy had, as her mom worked in Austin (comparatively a huge city) at the Governor’s office full of rich people, and they lived in a subdivision with many houses. My parents weren’t going to bail me out, and I did all of my sales alone, unlike Stacy – in this new digital era, someone like me would have had a level playing field with Stacy, and the sky’s the limit.

Good for the Scouts – this modern tactic will continue to teach Scouts important business lessons like how to be creative, how to pitch for a busy audience, how to identify influencers, and how to connect with influencers not personally known yet convince them to sell for you at no cost. No business lessons are lost here, just modernized.

And I’ll be ready for some Thin Mints when the big red “buy” button pops up on my Facebook page.