Every day after school for three months
in 2006, seven-year-old Victoria Rose Meek would don her
Brownie Girl Scout uniform and open her cookie stand for
business in the front yard of her home in Coronado, California.
If her hand-lettered neon green sign - which read "Girl Scout
Cookies, $4" - or free cookie samples failed to catch her
neighbors' attention, then Victoria would bring out the maracas
to lure passersby with her own cookie siren song: "I want
cookies/Girl Scout cookies/Samoas for Mommy/Tagalongs for
Daddy."
It would be easy to mistake Victoria for just another adorable
pixie in pigtails. But in fact, she's a pint-size sales dynamo
who sold 200 boxes on her first day and kept on charging. With
her cookie-marketing portfolio tucked under her arm, she braved
a rainstorm in order to canvass an unsolicited neighborhood.
She wrote and called corporations for contributions. She even
coached her fellow Troop 5329 Brownies to set higher sales
goals as she herself reached, and surpassed, her ultimate goal
- selling 2,006 boxes - to clinch the last of six winners'
seats on a helicopter ride over
San Diego. "I just kept saying
to myself, 'You can do it! You can do it!' " Victoria says.
Thanks in part to its highly motivated pixie-cute sales force
of 2.8 million girls, Girl Scouts of the USA makes a mint with
its annual cookie sale. The Cookie Program, as the organization
calls it, sells about 200 million boxes per year. At an average
price of $3.50 per box, that adds up to $700 million in
proceeds each year.