The cookie I’m eating right now is made of three essential Cs: chocolate, caramel and coconut. It’s just one of the millions of cookies that Girl Scouts will sell this year, totaling about $800 million in sales every year.
Girl Scout cookies have been on sale for weeks in Central Texas but I have yet to buy my family’s favorites.
On our way out one morning, my son reminded me of this, including which one is his favorite: the Thanks-A-Lot cookies.
How hard could it be? This time of year girls and their parents are everywhere selling those addictive and expensive little nuggets of happiness. The cookies are big and round – a regular vanilla flavor cookie, but dipped in chocolate.
I headed to a grocery store where 9-year-old Lola Grant was standing by her car in her tan vest and green sash.
“Right now, we are just packing up because we just finished our booth,” she says.
So I was a few minutes too late, but I ran out of luck when I asked Lola about the Thanks-A-Lot cookies.
I was about to give up but another troop still had a booth inside the grocery store. Ten-year-old Sidney Crow showed me her offerings.
“Actually – the true foils are kinda like the Thanks-A-Lot except they don’t have the chocolate,” she says.
That’s a big exception. “Yeah, I’d rather have chocolate on them too – I like chocolate,” she says.
So, why are Thanks-A-Lot M.I.A. in central Texas?
Amanda Avila, a spokesperson for Girl Scouts of Corpus Christi, says there are many factors councils consider when choosing a baker.
“Pricing, customer service, their overall experience with that baker,” she says.
After World War II, there were bakeries all over the country authorized to make Girl Scout cookies, 29 in total.
Now, there’s only two: one of them is called Little Brownies, a division of the Kellogg Company. The other is ABC Bakers.
“There’s four cookies that they have to have in their line-up,” Avila says, “and then each baker chooses the remaining 3 cookies that they choose.”
The baker for Central Texas is Little Brownies and they don’t make the Thanks-A-Lot variety. But they are available in Houston and the Valley.
This year, for the first time ever, you can buy them online. The Girl Scouts say face-to-face interactions help the girls learn about confidence and money management, but in this day and age, they also need to learn about how to build a business online. So if your favorite variety seems otherwise unavailable, you can say “Thanks-A-Lot” for e-sales.
