Girl Scouts and their damn cookies

You've seen them. They stand outside your local grocery store, Target or Walmart. They bring a little card table, some chairs and set up shop with a stack of cookie boxes and a money tin. They post up signs advertising their Thin Mints, Samoas, and Do-si-dos. Sometimes they accost you on your way in or out of the store, behaving like those perfume girls you find at the Estee Lauder counter. "Want to buy some cookies, Mister?" Other times they hire their goons to come to your office and provide a little extra coaxing to get you hooked on their product. These goons, affectionately dubbed "parents" by the cookie community, often resort to cheap guilt tactics or, in extreme cases, brute force methods.

Let's look at the business paradigm for a moment. On the surface one might easily dismiss the entire operation as a heavily supported youth girls' activity to raise funds for the organization while teaching young women entrepreneurial skills. We shant let the truth go untold, however. First, an examination of the product is necessary. What are these Mini-Trumps selling? They're selling cookies. Not just cookies, but inexpensive, thoroughly addictive cookies in our favorite flavors. While most ingredients on the box seem to be casually mild, there are two key addictive ingredients in every girl scout cookie that will make you crave it so badly you can eat the entire box without even pausing to breathe. These chemicals are 2-(hydroxymethyl)tetrahydropyran-2,3,4,5-tetraol and 6-(hydroxymethyl)oxane-2,3,4,5-tetrol. Without these chemicals, the chances of chemical dependency become almost negligible and psychological dependency follows suit.

There are a whole host of addictive products on the modern commercial market. Most of them require prescriptions or have age limits. Alcohol and tobacco have age limits. Pain medications require a prescription from an authorized medical physician. A whole host of other chemicals are completely outlawed due to their addictive properties and psychological effects. Girl scout cookies are fully legal and unregulated despite the massive distribution network and documented mind-bending effects.

Next let's visit the business tactics employed by these little pyramid tyrants. They're marketed aggressively, targeting the consumer unwittingly at common commercial venues, work areas, and even going so far as to go door-to-door to peddle these mind-bending, legal acid trips. They muscle in front of us at the store. They know of the absolute chemical need screaming within our veins. "Give me thin mints!" those cookie genes cry out. They offer discounts, bulk rates, they coax and wheedle us until our will power has left us bereft of dignity. They offer us free samples to whet our appetites, and then when they know they've got us hooked, they drop the hammer and move in for the kill.

Worse than that, they jockey for position amongst each other. It is not uncommon to find multiple groups at the same store attempting to muscle each other out of the picture. They push and pull at each other until only one table can reign supreme as the Girl Scout Cookie queens of the Walmart front entrance.

There is another business model that follows this same paradigm. There is another business that sells addictive chemicals, muscles competition, sends enforcers to where you work and where you live, engages in turf wars on public streets. They're called drug dealers. It's a crime to sell crack cocaine, but it's fully legal for 10 year old girls to sell Girl Scout Cookies which have 10 times the chemical addiction rate. These little queens of the asphalt tromp through our neighborhoods with impunity hocking their crippling products on an unsuspecting public. They don't need guns as drug dealers do. They don't need to engage in blatant acts of public violence. Why? Their product is legal. Their methods are sublime and covert.

They've got their hooks into us, and they know we'll be back for more. They don't need to break our knee caps to extract more money out of us. They just withhold their product from us claiming that it's not "the cookie season". Into starved, cookie-craving wrecks we turn. We ransack our houses looking for that secret stash we just know we left above the fridge behind the old phone books. We lash out in insipid rage when we discover that some devious family member discovered our stash weeks ago and used it to support his own habit. So we go crawling back to our dealer local girl scout troop begging for more of these evil treats.

It's just a matter of time before these miniature enterprises are forced to resort to the more brutal tactics offered by our local narcotics pushers. The day is not far off when we see the Girl Scout Cookie mobile cruising down the street with tinted windows, a bangin' stereo and a set of 'dubs. Perhaps it's already happened in your neighborhood and you just haven't realized it yet. How long will it be before your local cookie pusher is coming to your door with an Uzi looking for her props and dough.

It wouldn't surprise me if there were already entire "troops" of girl scouts already listed in the FBI's gang database. All I know is that I don't want to be caught in the gang crossfire at Walmart when the turf war begins to get out of hand. I'll just stick with the local pusher in my office to get my fix.