People skills are so important. Perhaps the executives at Girl Scouts could use some.

[Xithras]

5. The Girl Scouts have a good reason to worry about online cookie sales.

There's a real worry that a handful of powerful troops could build some cookie "supersites", effectively shutting out most of the other troops in the country. How would you like to be the girl sitting in front of a store in California trying to sell cookies, and have someone tell you "No thanks, I already bought my cookies online from a troop in Alabama".

The Girl Scouts don't want the troops in competition with each other for cookie sales, and moving sales online would place ALL of the troops into direct competition for the same customer base.

A few years ago our local troop approached me about building a "Buy A Cookie" app (I do a considerable amount of free software development for nonprofits). Their idea was to build a phone app where you could specify the cookies you wanted, and that order would be routed to the nearest troop that signed up for the app. Your cookies could them be delivered to you immediately, wherever you were, by local Girl Scouts. They thought it was a great idea, and so did I, but they were swatted down the moment they tried to get approvals from their council. The council wouldn't allow anything that even HINTED at online sales.