The Emotional Cost Of Girl Scout Cookies

Girl Scout Cookies are a very, very personal baked good. Name one other food that is so tied into our childhood psyche; name one other food about which we obsess primarily due to its exclusivity. You can’t. I just tried to think of how I could get my hands on some Samoas (my personal favorite) if I really needed to and I came up blank. There will be no Samoas for me. Which only makes me want them more.

How to get a Samoa? Do you have to know a child? Befriend someone in the PTA? I don’t know, but it’s making me feel like a caged animal with every passing minute. Not knowing where they are or if I’ll ever get to eat them again (and thereby relive the childhood tradition of buying up my Girl Scout quota so I may freeze them and have enough to last me until the next time I’m asked to sell a year’s supply of cookies to my blood relatives) is a strangely sad experience.

And I’m not alone in this stirring of many an emotion. A Florida woman is currently in jail on charges of beating up her roommate over a dispute surrounding the theft of her precious Thin Mint collection. To make matters worse, Hersha Howard, 31, not only burst into her roommate’s room to accuse her of the grave injustice, Howard hit her in the face, chased her with scissors, struck her with a board of some kind, BIT HER IN THE BREAST, and then hit her with a random sign she found outside. Then, presumably, she sat down and enjoyed those sweet, sweet cookies.

Can you blame her? There’s only one Girl Scout cookie SEASON! They’re seasonal! And not in the way that something like candy corn is seasonal, but if you drive around long enough you can find some candy corn hiding out in the back of a Walgreens. There is but one season a year specifically reserved for the purchase and consumption of a cookie that apparently has a patent attached to it because it is so exceptional, it would be an insult for anyone to come up with an acceptable substitute.

Not to mention the fact that finding a location where you can purchase them is no easy task. Even in Savannah, GA — near the home of the Girl Scouts founder herself — Girl Scouts have been banned from selling them on a public sidewalk after the city received a complaint from someone who wisely feared the unwieldy power of Tagalongs and declared it a violation of a city ordinance.

Would it be better if these cookies were simply available online? (As of right now, the best you can do is enter your info into their website and a local Girl Scout council person will contact you and somethingsomethingtoomuchwork.) Simple and straightforward online sales would certainly solve a lot of the aforementioned problems, but it would also take away the specialness of it all, and more importantly, it would take away the power from the little girls (and yes, oftentimes their mothers and fathers and the workplaces of said parents) responsible for selling them. And if having easier access to rare cookies means taking away the first shot little girls will have at feeling powerful, in control, and business-minded, I can deal with the scarcity of caramel and coconut in my life.