Seven young salespeople in blue vest uniforms stand in attention. They’re learning how to make a sale.
“You should never talk back to a customer and you should upsell,” their instructor says. “Does everyone know what upselling means?”
This scene, which opens Alysa Nahmias’s documentary, Cookie Queens, is not a marketing class but a Girl Scout meeting. The film is in theaters across the country, starting Aug. 7.
The film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, follows girls of varying ages during the organization’s cookie selling season. Somewhere in the woods near Charlotte, North Carolina, Olive G., an ambitious 12-year-old Scout and the state’s top cookie salesperson, schools her peers on the art of the sale.
Girl Scout Cookies sells over 250 million boxes, making $800 million annually in just six weeks, a bright pink title card in the film reads. Scouts like Olive (who at the time of the film made over $200,000 for the organization) make (depending on their troops and goals) a little more than $1 per box of cookies for their troops. The pricing varies across regions and troops, but each box is presently sold to consumers for around $6.
“It's technically child labor,” Olive says to her best friend and fellow Girl Scout, Celia, in the film. “Not forced, we signed up for this.” Even when the pressure to outsell others gets too much for her and she has to ask her own mother to go easy on her, Olive says, “it's fun, I love selling cookies.”
Every season, Scouts set sales goals for themselves and win ranked prizes. In order to attend Girl Scout camp, for example, Shannon Elizabeth, an 8-year-old from El Paso, TX needs to sell 2750 boxes of cookies. Before she can sell a single box, her family has to buy the required inventory at the retail price; there are no wholesale discounts or profits.
“I have a mortgage payment in my house right now, of cookies,” Shannon Elizabeth’s mother says in the film, having put down $16,500 for her daughter’s cookie inventory. “It’s slightly terrifying to know that we are responsible for [selling] them.”
Once their homes are converted into makeshift fortresses of cookie boxes, scouts like Olive, Shannon Elizabeth, Ara, and Nikki—the protagonists of the documentary—get to work selling them. They “sacrifice all their time to sell cookies” to meet their goals and recoup costs, Olive told Bon Appétit.
“It fluctuates by roughly 50 cents, where it's like the more you sell, you get a little higher,” said Nahmias. Olive’s troop makes $1.10 per box but that number varies across troops. The remaining per-box cost goes towards paying for the larger organization’s bakery, staff, and facilities.
Technically, all the Scouts make as remuneration are their badges and prizes—from plushies to camps, to trips to Europe—and their troops make little more than a dollar per box, depending on each local Girl Scout Council’s guidelines. What they do with that money is decided upon by a collective decision-making process that involves the Scouts and their councils, but it usually includes community service projects, travel, and other programming.
“I have always been very aware of political issues,” Olive said. “When you think about Girl Scouts not getting enough money per box, it is a political issue.” Which is why, towards the end of the film, Olive makes a bid for fair compensation for Girl Scouts, along with having a larger say in the organization’s programming.
Troops receiving more money per box sold through the Scouts’ labor will let them “go on trips,” Olive explains by way of example. “We might be able to pay for badges and people's membership because membership prices just got raised.” She wrote to the Girl Scout CEO, Tayuanee Dewberry, following which, the film tells us, Olive is invited to be a member of a non-voting advisory board.
Her involvement with “the board hasn't been as successful as I had hoped,” she said, “but I will certainly keep trying to get my demands. I am still writing letters, talking to people.”
Among Olive’s more immediate ambitions is to be a delegate at the National Girl Scout Convention. Delegates have the power to vote on matters like pricing and programming. “It's real Girl Scouts doing things, not just the adults in power, which I think is awesome,” she said.
For Nahmias, who made her filmmaking debut in 2011, Olive’s struggles are all too familiar.
“When I'm pitching my films, there is always that idea that cuteness sells. And I was interested in how early we start to get those ideas,” she says, admitting that before the film, her relationship to the Girls Scouts was minimal. “I really saw myself in the girls in a bigger way; it was never really about [scouting]. It was about girlhood and capitalism.”
Nahmias’s mother, she said, was a Girl Scout.
“She grew up in Chicago in the 1950s and ended up being the first person, not just the first woman in her big immigrant family, to go to college,” she says. “I remember her talking about Girl Scouts as one of the things she was able to do as a girl.”
Girl Scouting gave Nahmias’s mother a sense of agency. Similarly, the organization is an early training ground for developing leadership and business skills that millions of young girls, much like Olive and the film’s other protagonists, can hone through selling cookies.
It’s also a program that exposes scouts to hurdles women face in the workplace.
It is essentially the labor of girls like Olive, who stand on street corners, knock doors, and set up stalls in the biting cold, that fuels the Girl Scouts’ millions. Olive herself sacrifices her January birthday plans because it always lands in the middle of cookie season; she postpones celebrations to March. Zooming out, scout families sometimes teeter around debt to pay for the cookies.
To have to demand better compensation for their labor—which is always allocated to the troops, never personal income for the Scouts or their families—before they even turn 13 is an unfortunate early education for young women. For a program that started in 1917 and trains young girls in financial literacy and entrepreneurship, such questions of money are inevitable.
“What's fair and who deserves it?” said Nahmias. “Should the labor be given more power and more agency and more compensation?”
“Kids are way smarter than we give them credit for as a society,” said Olive. “I'm sure there are many Girl Scouts who haven't been given a voice who have had the same thoughts as me.”
As much as a better pay system is important to Olive, who has now sold cookies for nine years, she still feels the magic of Girl Scouts in the friendships she has forged. “The Girl Scout Law says to be a sister to every Girl Scout, and I really feel like we are sisters,” said the fast-talking teenager who, unsurprisingly, wants to be a Supreme Court justice when she grows up.
Your Honor’s favorite cookie, you may wonder? “Samoas all the way.”
Cookie Queens is playing in theaters all across the country.