If you’re mad about Girl Scouts selling cookies outside a Mt. Laurel dispensary, you might be Anti-American

Girl Scouts in Mount Laurel, New Jersey may have accidentally stumbled onto the most efficient cookie-selling strategy in modern history, and somehow that’s become controversial.

A local troop recently set up a cookie booth outside Daylite Dispensary, a recreational cannabis shop that opened in 2023. The girls, accompanied by adult chaperones, sold cookies to customers entering and leaving the store. According to the dispensary’s owner, the event was a hit. Customers loved it, cookies sold quickly, and the whole thing felt like a fun community moment.

Then the internet found out.

And, as usual, people decided they needed to be angry about something.

Girl Scouts Understand the Free Market

Let’s be honest here: this was a genius idea.

The entire point of the Girl Scouts cookie program is to teach kids basic business principles. Marketing. Sales. Understanding your audience. Learning where demand exists and positioning your product accordingly.

That’s exactly what happened here.

You have a group of young entrepreneurs selling cookies. They identified a location with heavy foot traffic and a customer base that might be interested in snacks. They set up shop. Sales went well.

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That’s not scandalous, that’s capitalism working exactly as intended.

Frankly, it’s the kind of business thinking most companies spend millions of dollars trying to figure out.

The Backlash Says More About People Than Girl Scouts

Of course, once the story started circulating online, criticism followed. Some people argued the Girl Scouts shouldn’t be selling cookies outside a dispensary because the girls themselves aren’t legally allowed inside the store.

Which is a pretty strange argument when you think about it for more than five seconds.

By that logic, the Girl Scouts shouldn’t sell cookies outside bars, liquor stores, or half the shopping centers in America. Yet every year you see cookie tables outside grocery stores, restaurants, and anywhere else with a steady stream of customers.

The reality is that nothing inappropriate was happening here. The girls were outside, supervised by adults, selling cookies to customers who wanted to buy them.

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The only “problem” was that the location made some people uncomfortable.

Girl Scouts Did Exactly What They’re Supposed to Do

Ironically, the sale itself was reportedly a success. Customers were enthusiastic, the dispensary owner welcomed the troop, and the whole thing served as a unique community partnership.

But after the backlash, a second planned sale had to be canceled.

So let’s recap: a troop of Girl Scouts finds a creative way to sell cookies, customers enjoy it, and the internet shuts it down because the optics made them nervous.

That’s unfortunate, because the girls involved did exactly what the program is designed to teach.

They recognized opportunity. They understood their market. And they executed.

If anything, the Girl Scouts in Mount Laurel deserve credit for thinking outside the box and embracing the basic principles of the free market.

And if that makes some people uncomfortable, maybe the problem isn’t the cookie booth.