DoorDash Is Ruining Girl Scout Cookie Season

DoorDash might be ruining the Girl Scout cookie season, and the most annoying part is that the Girl Scouts were doing just fine before the delivery service swooped in.

Earlier this year, DoorDash announced a partnership with the Girl Scouts of the U.S. As part of this partnership, people can now order Girl Scout cookies through DoorDash for on-demand delivery. The girl scouts themselves manage the inventory, coordinate delivery, and keep track of their orders. Objectively, this is a much faster method of delivery than what was previously possible.

Before DoorDash, customers would either have to track down a booth where cookies were being sold, order them through a Girl Scout they know and wait for the order to arrive, or use the Girl Scout website to order the cookies and pay $12.99 shipping. With the partnership, only a $3.99 delivery fee is charged and you could receive your boxes that same day.

I am not currently nor have I ever been a Girl Scout, so this is completely based on my outsider knowledge of the organization. From what I've come to understand, selling Girl Scout cookies is an annual practice that not only the members look forward to, but that grown adults without children wait in anticipation for. The scouts look forward to it because it is their main fundraiser for the entire year, and because of that they have to make a commitment to sell a certain number of boxes.

With DoorDash, some scouts are getting the short end of the cookie deal. A story from the San Francisco Chronicle reveals a combination of supply chain issues leaving some scouts without cookies and DoorDash allowing other scouts to sell to a wider market, has left troops with less resources unable to meet their sales goals.

In the end, the real issue here is that DoorDash is messing with something that was working just fine before it got there. Typically the organization sells around $800 million and though the pandemic did put a dent in that, the troops powered through by setting up contactless drive-thru booths and virtual cookie selling events. These scouts learned about the grind by doing exactly what the adult entrepreneurs did: adapting.

With DoorDash intervening, the Girl Scouts are shown a different side of today's business world, that those with more technology and more money achieve goals a whole lot faster. That's a harsh reality that these Girl Scouts didn't have to be subjected to. Sure managing deliveries and handling inventory are great business skills to have, but the Girl Scouts were already doing this before DoorDash came into play. Plus, the lack of delivery service pushed scouts to go out into their respective communities, making connections, and learning about true customer service. That's not something DoorDash can teach.

So, if it ain't broke, why are you trying to DoorDash it?