If you put an order in for Girl Scout cookies, make room in your freezer and pantry - about 400,000 packages are making their way through western and central Massachusetts alone. The distribution can be a heavy lift, but as WAMC found out – the scouts have a system.
With snow covering the parking lot and most of West Springfield still at home early Saturday morning, dozens of Girl Scouts, troop leaders and volunteers were moving thousands of cookies at a time.
Working out of the back of a movie theater parking lot, the West Side operation was one of four distribution sites firing on all cylinders over the weekend – unloading close to 6,600 cases off several tractor trailers in hours.
Each case of Thin Mints, Samoas or Trefoils packs 12 packages – all going into the back of waiting SUVs and trucks wrapped around the lot.
Michelle Fama of Troop 65103 arrived with a large order sheet and left with a van packed with cookies.
“Thin Mints are [the] most popular, we definitely do more Thin Mints than anything else,” she explained from the driver’s seat, pointing to her troop’s “bubble sheet,” listing how many of the nine cookie flavors she was picking up. “These are all the number of cases that we need. So, for me, I did 125 cases per 13 girls, so I've got over 1,000 boxes I'm picking up today. And so, there's Adventurefuls, Lemon-Ups, Trefoils, Do-si-dos, Samoas, Tagalongs, Thin Mints, S’mores and Toffee-tastics.”
Dubbed the “Annual Girl Scout Cookie Drop,” it effectively kicks off the cookie season, with sales running through March.
Organizers say those sales do much more than allow households to replenish their Thin Mints supply. Speaking with WAMC, CEO of the Girl Scouts of Central and Western Massachusetts Theresa Lynn explains that for the 6,000 Girl Scouts in the region and the 3,000 adults volunteering and running troops – the treats fund trips, projects and activities.
“The money stays local - this money stays with the girls in their troop and in our local council,” she said. “They earn money to do the things they want to do, whether they want to go to an adventure camp, maybe they want to go do an archery program, maybe they want to go on a trip. Maybe they go to DC to see all the museums and learn about American history. It's really girl-driven, that's the important thing is they decide. We don't decide, they decide.”
Lynn describes the cookie program as a golden opportunity for helping girls develop a number of skills – not just selling, but budgeting, creating “cookie booths” and marketing are all part of the process.
Sporting several cookie selling badges, 15-year-old Abby Kane of Southwick says it’s one of the hallmarks of being a scout - that, and the friendships made along the way - experiences she recommends to anyone thinking about joining.
"… you're going to make lifelong friends in this troop, and you'll probably have the friends for up to - you're in college, you're in high school, you're just gonna keep them forever. So just really, the environment and the people in it,” she said.
It’s also not just the Girl Scouts getting experience. Putting boots on the ground Saturday were the Civil Air Patrol members hailing from the Westover Composite Squadron, forming an assembly line shifting cases from trucks to pallets to vehicles.
“Our guys in the trucks will count out the amount of cookies that are being loaded into each box, then the guy reads the bubble sheets, we bring over the cookies and since we have all the boxes counted out, it's easy to say, ‘Oh, well, this car needs 60, we have 45 in this box. We load it all in, then we only need 15 more,” said 17-year-old Darius Rojas, Cadet Second Lieutenant.
Overseeing Rojas and the other cadets was Captain Karen Chevalier, who calls the effort, and Girl Scouts as a whole, an exercise in community building.
“It brings togetherness in the community,” said Chevalier, who has been assisting with Cookie Drops for the past 5-6 years. “I myself was never a Girl Scout, but I know many people were. It's camaraderie, it's friendship, it's family, it's cookies - it's all of it, and I think the Girl Scouts is an amazing organization and what they bring to our community.”
The Cookie Drop in West Springfield wrapped up by 10:30 a.m. after starting at 7. Other drops went on in Springfield, Townsend and Worcester - which doled out the most cases: 15,620 or 187,440 packages.
All in all, just over 391,000 packages were distributed – bound for offices, pantries and pop-up stands at churches and grocery stores.
Chris Schwanter is a Board of Directors member for the Girl Scouts of Central and Western Mass., and first got involved 20 years ago when his daughter was a scout.
“I’d say that we're more than cookies, that we are there to help educate and enlighten girls on everything they're going to need to know, both from just getting along with each other and how to interact with the world, and that's part of what the cookies do, is that they're going have to go out and sell these cookies, and they're going to learn to interact and all the lessons there,” he said as he took part in his first Cookie Drop. “- and, of course, the financial lessons, but just learning how to interact with folks of all kinds, to be able to do this.”
Cookie season kicks into high gear on Friday, Jan. 17, when many troops officially begin their sales and continue through March 16.
