No, I don’t mean that they’ve set up a cookie-selling booth. I mean that they’ve gotten into the licensing game. Now, Boy Scouts do this already. Here’s my son’s First Aid kit, purchased at Meijer, which, by the way, we purchased because it seemed to fit the bill, not because of the logo.
In case it’s not clear, here’s the logo in the corner:
And here are the Girl Scout-branded products: Barbies
and an Easy-Bake Oven-like cookie oven:
The Barbie, by the way, is priced online at 17.99, the oven at 49.99, but with cookie refills selling at 6.99, Amazon readers complained that it works out to a pretty expensive cost per cookie. (The Toys R Us site isn’t clear, but Amazon says that the refill packs make 10 cookies each.)
An online “mommy blog” review called it a “miss” because the cookies were small and didn’t taste like real Girl Scout cookies, another reviewer (who received the product free from the manufacturer) had a “meh” review as well, obeserving that the cookies come out looking nothing like the pictures on the packages, and tasting only modestly similar.
So, again, we’re a Boy Scout family, with my husband the scoutmaster and all three boys involved. And it’s hard to say what we’d be up to if we had girls — whether we’d be making the most of the Girl Scout program, trying one of the competitors like the American Heritage Girls, or just trying to teach her “scouting” skills within the family.
But are these licensing deals really going to do anything to promote Girl Scouting? All I see is a marketing of Girl Scout cookies, and a reinforcing of the imagine that Girl Scouts are all about cookie-selling and crafts, where the Boy Scouts, on the other hand, capitalize on their “Be Prepared” heritage.