ALPHARETTA, Ga. — Metro Atlanta Girl Scouts are sitting on nearly $3 million worth of cookies that they cannot sell because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Any other year, Girl Scouts would have boxes of cookies set up on tables outside local grocery stores, but the pandemic has left hundreds of thousands of boxes sitting in an Alpharetta warehouse.
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Top cookie seller Najya Robinson told Channel 2′s Berndt Petersen that she cannot believe how high the cases are stacked.
“It’s a lot of cookies! I did not know there was this many cookies left over,” she said.
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Girl Scouts of Greater Atlanta CEO Amy Dosik says that just for the Atlanta-area troops, more than 720,000 boxes remain unsold.
“Girl Scout cookies, in a normal year, would not be sitting in this warehouse…What we didn’t anticipate is how many fewer girls would set up cookie booths and go door to door to sell,” she told Petersen.
Before the pandemic, local troops would sell four million boxes, but even with the cookie drive being extending through April, only two and a half million boxes have been sold.
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The cookies do not expire until September and will keep longer if frozen, but the inside of a warehouse can get hot during the summer.
Robinson says she has already sold 500 boxes of cookies and will keep pushing.
“I think people want cookies, they just don’t know where to find them. I think these cookies can get sold,” she said.
The Girl Scouts are asking Atlanta’s corporate community to step up and buy the cookies by the case. They can also be purchased online here.
