My pursuit of refined sugar knows no limit.
I’m not ashamed to admit I rode the wave of trendy cupcakes and cronuts like any other junkie hoping to score another high.
But for me, no sweet treat has been as enduring as the addictive Girl Scout cookie.
It’s hard being a Girl Scout cookie fiend. Those cookies don’t make themselves readily available — you have to hunt them down.
What does a person have to do around here to score a decent stockpile of Thin Mints?
Living in an NYC apartment building may get me off the hook when the kids come calling on Halloween, but it also means that none of the city’s 28,000 Girl Scouts comes knocking at my door.
This year’s unending snowfall hasn’t helped, either. In Washington, DC, a delivery of more than half a million cookie boxes was held up over the weekend.
My obsession dates back to my own Brownie and Girl Scout days, when troop meetings were held inside my Oceanside, LI school cafeteria, and I would brim with pride in my uniform, festooned with patches. I get nostalgic (and hungry) when I recall those days of the hard sell, going door to door pushing colorful boxes of Tagalongs, Samoas and the aptly titled Thanks-A-Lot. The Cookie Program is said to teach scouts valuable life skills, like business ethics and goal setting.
Apparently, these are lifelong skills, because my goal this year — as Girl Scout cookie season kicked off last week in the New York area — is to come up with a plan guaranteed to get me the goods.
No more drunk-dialing Girl Scout hot lines, wondering when they’d set up shop in some Midtown office building lobby.
No more waiting by the side of a road for a cookie-mobile that will never show — that happened last year when a blizzard thwarted my efforts to score some from the truck making its rounds across the city.
I tried using the new Cookie Finder app, but it directed me to a Walmart in Garfield, NJ, on March 8. This simply won’t cut it.
When I visited the US Mint in fifth grade, I innocently asked if it could increase production for increased demand, you know, to stem our national debt and stuff.
I ask the same question of the Thin Mint factory.
Why can’t one of the official cookie makers, like the Little Brownie Bakers in Louisville, Ky., simply make enough of the goodies for me and the rest of the country? Or at least cut out the middleman — the doe-eyed dealers who freeze me out year after year — and fulfill my private order?
“Selling cookies is an important component of the leadership development experience. The only way to purchase Girl Scout cookies is from local Girl Scouts,” says a bakery rep, delivering another blow to my plan.
Sure, everyone knows a guy who knows a guy — “Meet me in the Target parking lot in Suffolk County within the hour!” or “We just hit the mother lode on the eBay black market”— but some promise of a cookie six weeks from now is not going to help me take the edge off this winter. “Best I could do is late March,” says my proxy dealer, who’s the bat mitzvah tutor of a Girl Scout in Jersey.
Finally, I had a breakthrough last Friday, when the Girl Scouts set up a table in Grand Central.
“Cookie season is the best season — making people happy and making friends,” chirps 9-year-old Lily from Staten Island, when I show up at the station’s Vanderbilt Hall to get my mitts on some cookies. That’s great, but I’m not here to make friends, sweetie, I’m here to score some treats.
I nabbed my four boxes — $16 very well spent. It’s a reserve that should get me through the next nor’easter.
But how do I ensure lifelong access to the cookies, so I never have to take a leave of absence from my job or check out of my normal life in order to hunt them down in the future?
The credo is “Once a Girl Scout, Always a Girl Scout.” We’ll see about that.
“Can you accord me permanent membership, with all the privileges and perks during cookie season?” I ask a Girl Scout rep.
“There’s a wonderful leadership advisory board,” I’m told.
“But we can’t get cookies whenever we want,” the Girl Scouts rep explains, gently and slowly. “It’s a program.”
Hopes dashed, request denied. Guess that’s the way the cookie crumbles.