Lakewood – Falicia Hodges’ patch-laden, double-flapped Girl Scout vest fluttered in the wind as she stepped up the driveway of the white-brick, ranch-style home, danced over some oil stains and made a beeline for the door.
Cookie sale No. 500 of the week was at hand, and the 11-year-old could feel it.
“This is Vic’s house,” Falicia’s mother, Holly, called out to her daughter, referring to handwritten notes stuffed in a green folder. “Vic’s a good customer.”
So good that Falicia’s broad smile dropped a bit when a woman answered the door.
“Um, would you like to buy some Girl Scout cookies?” the fifth-grader asked.
“No.”
The door shut. Falicia’s brow furrowed.
“Don’t worry,” the girl’s mother assured her, “we’ll come back when Vic’s home.”
Colorado’s Girl Scout-cookie season is in full swing, a $12 million-a-year statewide industry built on $3-a-box Samoas, Do-si-dos and Thin Mints hawked by ponytailed girls with sweet smiles and order forms.
But don’t let those doe eyes and campfire patches fool you. Like Falicia, some of those girls pushing Lemon Coolers and All Abouts are a determined lot, with shrewd business strategies and parents helping execute every detail.
Cookie-selling in Colorado is a 25-hour-a-week job for top sellers and their families, a mini-enterprise built on spreadsheets, a little consumer-behavior knowledge and leg power.
“From January to March, it’s pretty much my life,” said Janice Leiker, 42, whose 12-year-old daughter, Tiffany, sold 1,434 boxes last year around her Federal Heights neighborhood. “In the end, I’ll put in a little more time than she does.”
Girl Scouts across the state averaged 100 boxes in sales last year, but elite sellers reached 1,000 boxes within the sale’s first two weeks, from mid- to late-January, then hit 2,000-plus before the sale’s end in early March.
But it’s not a competition, moms and daughters say. They simply enjoy spending time together, earning money for trips to camp, swim and ride horseback.
“We have a blast,” said Falicia’s mother, Holly. Falicia sold 1,316 boxes last year.
“If we didn’t enjoy it, we wouldn’t be doing it,” said Hodges, who remembers the first names of her daughter’s best customers and speaks to each one.
Selling strategies are endless, but the commitment is the same.
Falicia and her mother work from 9:30 a.m. to sundown on weekends, using notes and past cookie-order forms to guide them to can’t-miss buyers.
Debbie Champion, 48, drives her 14-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, 44 miles around Dillon and Silverthorne to visit longtime customers. Elizabeth sold 2,605 boxes in 2005, one of the highest tallies in Colorado.
And each year during February booth sales – when Girl Scouts sell in groups at supermarkets and other high-traffic areas – Linda Petersen takes phone numbers from customers’ personal checks so her daughter can make those sales alone next year.
“I want her to succeed,” the 45-year-old Parker woman said of her 11-year-old daughter. “It’s not like it’s cheating.”
But it can be a bit addictive.
There are individual rewards; $100 and $200 savings bonds and patches with “Cookie Diva,” “200+” and “800+” logos that signify cookie dominance.
“The more I sell, the happier I’ll be,” said Petersen’s daughter, Randi Petersen-Srock, who sold 1,100 boxes last year.
Her secret?
“You’ve got to smile, have a good attitude, be polite and patient with (customers),” the sixth-grader said. “Anything that will get us the sale.”
Nearly 4 million boxes – more than 90 million individual cookies – were sold in five councils across Colorado last year, about 2 percent of the estimated 200 million boxes that scouts sold nationwide.
In the Mile Hi Council, the state’s largest, 26,000 girls from the Denver-metro area west to Summit County sold an estimated 2.5 million boxes in 2005, putting its volume in the Top 10 nationally among more than 300 chapters from Hawaii to Maine.
Forty-six girls in the Mile Hi Council sold 1,000 boxes or more.
“The Girl Scout brand has huge equity,” said John Burnett, a professor at the University of Denver, who is writing a book on nonprofit marketing. “They’ve used sales and blended it perfectly into an altruistic mission that people don’t question.”
And each year, Girl Scouts make it harder to say no.
Watching your fat intake? Two cookies are trans-fat-free. Don’t like cookies? You can donate boxes to anyone from soldiers to hospital workers, and the Girl Scouts will deliver them for free.
Then there’s the girls themselves.
Girl Scouts of the USA “has something going for them that others don’t have, and that’s cute little girls” to do the selling, said Margaret Campbell, a marketing professor at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business.
Whether they realize it or not, Campbell said, the young scouts are free labor used to fund multimillion-dollar programs.
For example, the Mile Hi Council earned about $7.5 million in gross sales in 2005, which was broken down this way:
A $3 box costs the chapter 81 cents, leaving $2.19 in profit. From that, $1.61 went to the council’s programs, 50 cents went to individual troops based on sales totals and the remaining 8 cents went to awards and other prizes.
“If you looked at the (scouts’) business strategy, you’d see that it would match most large companies’,” Burnett, the DU professor, said.
On a recent weekend, 12-year-old Jenna Curlee walked her Centennial neighborhood with her father, carrying a box of new-to-the-market Cafe Cookies that she offered potential clients.
“They’re great with cocoa,” she said to one.
“They’re great with coffee,” another customer was told.
“They’re great for sharing,” she reminded another.
Alas, sales were slow, especially for a girl who topped 1,000 boxes last year. In two hours and a half-mile of walking, she sold only 13 boxes. But she kept going.
“Dad, I think we should come back to this house. I heard someone vacuuming downstairs.”
“Got it,” her father, Greg, said.
And going.
“Dad, there’s someone here, I see them.”
“Maybe they’re trying to tell you something,” Dad said.
And going.
“Dad, I don’t think that guy spoke English.”
“Maybe we need to bring a translator,” Greg Curlee joked. “Remember that next year.”
A few cities away in Lakewood, Falicia and her mother were still at work. Mom checking addresses, daughter ringing doorbells.
And don’t think they didn’t remember Vic. Last week, the cookie duo again walked up his driveway, knocked on the door and smiled.
And Vic answered.
“He bought four boxes,” Holly Hodges said with a laugh. “We were pretty happy about that.”
Staff writer Robert Sanchez can be reached at 303-820-1282 or rsanchez@denverpost.com.
