Are Girl Scout Cookies Corrupting?

I'm the volunteer cookie sale manager for my daughter's service unit, which consists of ~35 troops and ~400 girls. We're part of the Girl Scouts of Eastern Massachusetts Council, one of two councils in Massachusetts.

The cookie sale is primarily a fundraiser for a council. The council sets the price (in our case, $4.00 per box). Out of the $4.00 per box, here's where the money goes:

Council Programs and Properties (50%): $2.00 Baker (22.5%): $0.90 Troop Proceeds (15.5%): $0.62 Administration (9%): $0.36 Girl Incentives (3%): $0.12

GSUSA gets their cut out of the Baker's share as a licensing fee.

If you look at the Program Guide for our council, (http://www.girlscoutseasternmass.org/programs/) you'll see that it offers a large number of programs and camps for girls in eastern MA, at very reasonable cost. Half the money from the sale goes towards property maintenance and operations, keeping the cost down for all girls, and for scholarships for girls who cannot otherwise afford them.

Something isn't quite right about this article. First the author compares the rise in cookies prices compared to inflation instead of commodity prices. This was a red flag to me that was repeated more than once.

Fuel and food prices have been rising sharply these past few years. I'm not a commodities expert so maybe someone with more insight can help, but this chart looks like wheat prices went up 50% in 2010 alone and are double what they were in 1995.

http://futures.tradingcharts.com/hist_CW.html

This has been in the news quite a bit.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/03/16/business/main20043...

So that $2.50 pack of white label cookies from WalMart was probably $1 way back in 1995. It's not surprising that the $2 pack of Girl Scout cookies from 1995 is $4 today.

There was an awful lot of text and analysis for completely missing this point.

To the author's other complaint that cookies are cost inefficient, all of these cookie sale type fundraisers (e.g. bake sales, car washes, popcorn sales, magazine sales, cheese and sausage sales) are obviously less efficient than direct donations. But I suppose they serve a few other purposes than fund raising. Scouts potentially learn life skills about working and business instead of how to beg for money with tangible benefits for the troop. The proliferation of cookie boxes are free advertising real estate in millions of offices and homes that lead to greater participation and perhaps more donations than if the Girl Scouts solicited for donations directly. Those are just a couple of reasonable explanations off the top of my head before jumping to accusations of corruption most high.

Girl Scout cookies are about the worst cookies for you I have ever seen. I used to like them when I was a kid, but then I looked at the ingredients. In order to make them have a shelf life of months (long enough to be sold) at room temperature, they are loaded with trans fats, preservatives, and all kinds of bad chemicals. It's nice to support the girl scouts, but seriously, they are poisoning America with this junk. Can't we just give them a few bucks instead of buying toxic cookies?