You Can Buy Girl Scout Cookies On Amazon, But Here’s Why You Shouldn’t

If you want to buy some Girl Scout cookies but haven’t spotted a Girl Scout this season, you might be excited to learn that the cookies are now available on Amazon. But here’s what you need to know: you absolutely should not buy them from these resellers found on Amazon.

First, the Girl Scouts of the USA are concerned cookies might be old or inauthentic. “Girl Scouts USA, your local Girl Scout council, and our licensed cookie bakers cannot guarantee the freshness or integrity of these cookies,” a representative from Girl Scouts of the USA told HuffPost. “In many instances, these cookies are actually expired.”

Second ― and more importantly ― you’d totally rob the Girl Scouts of the whole reason they’re selling the cookies in the first place. And that reason is to help them learn new tools from real life experiences. The Girl Scouts of the USA explains that the whole point of selling the cookies is to help the girls build “essential life skills, such as goal setting, people skills and business ethics.”

Those third-party Girl Scout cookie vendors you find on Amazon are robbing the girls of those valuable lessons ― and they’re robbing you of some money, because they’re sold at a fairly substantial mark up. And the Girl Scouts are not benefitting in any way from this mark up, since the cookies were bought from them at their normal price.

Only the third party reseller benefits. Everyone else loses.

“Buying the cookies through Amazon is giving people access to cookies without access to Girl Scouts, which undercuts the programmatic element,” a spokesperson for the Girl Scouts of the USA told New York Magazine.

Do you really need to get your hands on a box of Samoas that badly?