Young one: Girl Scout Cookies generate more than $700 million in annual sales.

From the Market

Keighley Young is a cookie-selling superstar.

by Mara Zepeda

On this freezing cold morning in Exton, homicidal icicles fall from the roof of Wal-Mart. People pushing carts run for their lives. Keighley Young sits outside watching the scene with mild curiosity while tending to her table of Girl Scout Cookies.

Fourteen-year-old Keighley has been selling cookies for the past month. On Thursday and Friday evenings and weekend mornings she’s stationed herself outside banks, supermarkets and big-box stores with the goal of selling 1,500 boxes, which will earn her two weeks at Girl Scout camp. But she’s already surpassed that goal.

A family of four buys a box of Thin Mints, the 1,614th box of Keighley’s cookies. She beams. “I think they take pity on me because I’m turning purple,” she says.

In this age of thong-wearing middle schoolers attached to their cell phones, an entrepreneurial adolescent selling boxes of cookies looks like an anachronism. You might wonder why 3 million girls continue to sell millions of boxes of cookies, all for no profit and modest personal gain.

Later in life Keighley’s cookie sales will be listed on her job applications. “I think it shows real commitment,” says her mother Laura Schwartz.

Girl Scout Cookies generate more than $700 million in annual sales. In recent years some troops have offered Cookie Colleges with classes in marketing, communication and money management. For each $3.50 box of cookies sold, the Council receives $2. Another 63 cents goes to the troop for field trips, travel and activities. Goodwill boxes are shipped to troops overseas via the “Cookies From Home” program. (Am I the only one looking forward to a memoir titled Samoas in Baghdad?)

That she will have generated more than $7,000 in sales is of little interest to Keighley. All she’s concerned with is her two weeks at camp—early morning dips in the pond and afternoons at the arts and crafts table.

“I want her to be as much of a kid as possible. She’s a very young 14. And I’m glad,” says Schwartz, who was elated to be spared the Britney Spears frenzy, but is now tolerating Hannah Montana mania.

Keighley acknowledges that many of her peers are no longer interested in patches and sing-alongs. “Once they hit middle school, they drop out,” she says. But the Girl Scouts of America is doing its best to stay hip and relevant. Sprinkled throughout the Eastern Pennsylvania Council’s program offerings are courses that explore medical careers and forensic science. Keighley’s troop is planning an outing to a mechanic shop, where they’ll learn the basics of car maintenance.

By noon the mother and daughter pair are doing cheers to keep warm, using boxes of cookies as pompoms. They’re excited, they’re ready to sell, they’re ready to start rationing the dozen boxes of Thin Mints they’ve allowed themselves over the next year. By the end of the month, when the final numbers are tallied, Keighley will have sold more than 2,000 boxes.

Camp awaits.