Chris Hinkle for The New York Times
Last year, customers of 10-year-old Mary Ruiz of Tucson bought 5,007 boxes of Girl Cookies.
TUCSON — When you buy a box of Girl Scout cookies and devour 10 in a single sitting, as untold numbers of people will in the next month, you are propping up a pretty sizable enterprise.
During last year’s sales season, scouts sold $785 million worth of Thin Mints, Samoas and all the rest, about 215 million boxes in all. Our collective annual binge may well represent the greatest continuing marketing bonanza an American nonprofit group has ever created.
But for the 1.5 million or so girls who do the selling, it also represents an opportunity. They handle more money than they might have ever seen in one place, build sales skills long before they have their first part-time jobs and earn prizes — commissions, in effect — that their parents might not be able to afford or wouldn’t buy for them.
Which is how 10-year-old Mary Ruiz managed to stock her small bedroom here with an iPad, laptop and Nintendo DS. Last year, her customers bought 5,007 boxes of cookies. While the national organization does not collect individual rankings, it’s doubtful that more than a tiny handful of girls outsold her.
To her mother, Pilar, who is also her troop leader, this is a source of pride. To other parents, sales season is a source of dread, when work schedules conspire to keep them from chaperoning their children for after-school sales calls while boxes and order forms consume the weekends.
Still, it’s hard to imagine a better way for children to learn to pitch, and keep pitching, than this. And so I trailed the younger Ms. Ruiz this week as she politely knocked on the door of a pink house on East 19th Street with a “No Soliciting” sign (a friend had tipped her off that it was all right to try), provided reinforcements to University of Arizona freshmen outside Safeway who had already consumed multiple boxes in the preceding days and tried to close another deal in Spanish.
She pulls an oversize wagon stuffed with meticulously organized boxes and nestles an American flag in between. A sign explains what’s known in the Girl Scout world as her “gift of caring.” For her, it’s an effort to persuade customers to donate change from their purchase toward more cookies or to buy extra boxes outright for soldiers abroad and firefighters and police officers nearby. This can work more than half the time, particularly when customers are already expecting just a small amount of change from a $20 bill. Last year, she delivered 504 boxes to local police officers and arranged donations of 192 boxes to soldiers.
This has had particular resonance in the area in the wake of the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and several others two years ago. At the South Tucson Police Department, where Ms. Ruiz volunteers regularly and brings officers gifts on their birthdays, she has her own mailbox.
All of this hand-to-hand selling takes time. She took just two days off, including weekends, during the six-week selling season last year and put in about 28 hours each week, on average.
In exchange for her efforts, she earned all manner of goodies from her local scouting council. This year, Ms. Ruiz stands to earn a trip to a local water park, a visit to Disneyland, a “V.I.P. Club” experience (no parents allowed), a beach bike and another iPad or laptop.
There comes a point at which all of this may begin to seem less like an educational activity and fund-raising mechanism and more like trying to land in the leader’s circle for commissioned sales representatives at Pfizer or someplace similar. But Pilar Ruiz believes it does not cross the line.
“She doesn’t have a lot of the other things that other kids have unless she’s earned them,” she said. “And I think she gets much more satisfaction out of that and takes great pride in owning them when she has worked for them.”
Cookie sales don’t just benefit the individual girls. Some of the money goes to the local Girl Scout council, which often uses it to provide scholarships for lower-income scouts to attend summer camp. Each troop also retains some money, and Ms. Ruiz’s troop, which sold over 12,000 boxes total last year, has retained $13,000 over the years, which it has earmarked for group travel.
Your Money: For This Girl Scout, It’s More Than Pushing Cookies
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Your Money: For This Girl Scout, It’s More Than Pushing Cookies
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Your Money: For This Girl Scout, It’s More Than Pushing Cookies
