Cookie booths are the fast and safe way to sell cookies in a time when many parents no longer feel comfortable sending their kids door to door.

When I was a kid, there was one way to sell cookies and that was to take my cookie sheet and go door to door, knocking on them all and asking whomever opened the door if they wanted to buy some Girl Scout cookies. I knew many of the occupants of the homes I visited. Customers often would buy a few boxes, saving some of their choices for the next Girl Scout to knock on their door. When I got older, a fellow Scout and I, frustrated with the low yield of these door-to-door sales, decided to maximize our sales in the minimum of square footage by hitting the local college dorm.

I lived in a small town in the middle of America, so I did this without so much as a chaperone. It wasn't until I hit the college dorm that I even went out to sell with a buddy. In fact, selling with a buddy was something I avoided at all costs, since having a buddy by my side or even on the same street would only reduce my sales!

My sales were pretty good with these methods. I seem to recall selling enough to earn the incentives of my choice, but for every ten boxes I sold as a kid, I may have had to approach 5-10 customer houses. These days, my two Girl Scouts can get a 20-box sale from one customer. Honestly, as the parent helping to deliver hundreds of boxes, I am relieved when a case or more goes to one address. Going back and forth to the same house six or seven times to deliver one box rapidly becomes tiresome because I no longer live in the middle of America and we no longer live in an age when our Girl Scouts can canvas the local neighborhood in search of sales without a parent or other adult chaperone in tow.

Many parents take the Girl Scout order forms to work, which is understandable since working parents have even less time than I do to go back and forth to homes to deliver with their Scouts. The problem that I have always had with this form of parental help is that it undermines one of the benefits of cookie sales, namely that the GIRL learns sales techniques and the GIRL earns money for her Scouting activities.

And, ok, as a child who did not have a parent in an office setting, I admit it... I always felt like those who sent their sheets to work with parents were somehow cheating. Fast forward to the present and I am relieved that office sales provide an avenue for selling that does not send my girls into the world to strange houses. However, despite my repeated offers, I could not convince my husband to wear a Brownie beanie as he peddled Girl Scout cookies at work.

To return to my main point, and the topic of this article, there is an option that does not require parents to don beanies and knee socks, that allows me to chaperone my girls as THEY sell, and that allows the girls to do the selling. That option is cookie boothing.

Cookie booths were not something we did in my town when I was a kid, but they are easily my favorite method of sales now. Where we live, we have a cookie booth goddess who coordinates booth dates and times throughout our metro area. General targets are grocery and video stores on weekends, particularly Friday and Saturday nights.

Once assigned a spot, we take some pre-ordered cookies and a card table and proceed to sell as many as 500 boxes of cookies in an evening. In finding some links for this article, I stumbled across a statistic that 85% of people will buy Girl Scout cookies if approached. That statistic goes a long way in explaining why we do so well with a card table of cookies set up outside a local grocery store and a small group of cherubic Brownies asking people to buy their Thin Mints!

The parents watch, encourage, and provide hints, but the girls do the selling, and the best part is that they wear the beanies (ok, I lie, few girls will wear beanies without a good solid bribe, but at least they do wear their vests!) Thus from my perspective cookie booths meet all the goals of cookie selling: the girls learn sales techniques, practice social and selling skills, and make the actual sales themselves.