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Publish date 1/24/2006
Girl Scout cookie sellers bring in lots o' dough
MJ and Dorié Le Buchanan stepped out of their mom's car as the snow continued to fall Thursday. “It's amazing what these vests fit over,” said their mom, Dorié Buchanan. The two were almost finished with their quest to sell 10,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies. They had only 146 more to go. “Oh, I can't buy that many,” said Sharon Swindler with a laugh after the girls knocked on Swindler's door and told her of their goal. “Our new cookie this year is the Cafe Cookie,” said Dorié Le, a ninth-grader at Loveland High School. “It's a cinnamon cookie that tastes good with coffee.” Swindler, who said she is a distant relative to Girl Scout founder Juliette Gordon Low, quickly grabbed her checkbook and signed up to buy 10 boxes. Only 136 to go. MJ, an eighth-grader at Pioneer School for Expeditionary Learning in Fort Collins, and Dorié Le have sold Girl Scout cookies for seven years. “Those two girls are real go-getters,” said their troop leader, Debra Gibbs. Their mom, Dorié, has kept meticulous records of the girls' sales, hanging on to each cookie-sale sheet with the names, addresses and cookie orders of each customer throughout the years. “We've seen customers with newborn babies and now they're 7 years old and want to be a Girl Scout,” Dorié said. “It's a microcosm of life in your own neighborhood.” Peggy Lewis, the product sales director for Girl Scouts-Mountain Prairie Council, said the council doesn't keep track of cookie-sale records, “but that has to be very close.” Out of the 6,000 girls involved in the Mountain Prairie Council, about 100 — 1 percent of the girls — sell 500 or more boxes of cookies in a year. Dorié Le and MJ have each sold more than 500 boxes every year since 2000. And at $3 a box, the sisters have sold about $30,000 worth of cookies. “You know, we could get a really nice car with that,” Dorié said. Each night during cookie-selling season, the girls return from school, eat a snack, finish homework, and by 5 p.m., start the rounds. “You learn how to talk to people and get along with people,” Dorié Le said. “And meet goals.” They scour the neighborhoods from First Street to Eisenhower Boulevard and from Garfield Avenue to Wilson Avenue. They remember what their customers usually order — Thin Mints and Tagalongs are the most popular — and have seen people grow up and move out. They know which house is decorated with Coca-Cola memorabilia, who has the dog named Flower and who remembers when boxes of Girl Scout cookies were a quarter each. But each year it's the same routine — the girls and their mother combing the streets selling cookies in a “family affair.” “It's kind of like football widows,” Dorié said. “Except we leave the men at home.”
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