The Sly Oyster | culture & entertainment on the sly

Sometimes the radio is good for something. I was cruising home from work, if you consider stop and go rush hour cruising, and the DJ mentions some Girl Scout sold enough cookies to fund a trip to Europe.

Then he mentions that she might have broken some record, but there’s no way to tell since these kinds of records aren’t kept. One, it’s crazy they don’t keep records like this to breed competition amongst the Girl Scouts and two, that’s a lot of cookies.

“When I was in third grade, the top seller was 10,176. … I turned to my mother and said, ‘That’s going to be me one day,’ and it took me seven years,” [Jennifer Sharpe], 15, said.

Jennifer, a fan of the Thin Mints, used a retail-inspired strategy. She set up shop in the parking lot of Cherry Hill Presbyterian Church in Dearborn. She manned that booth 3-7 p.m. Monday through Saturday. On Sundays, she sold cookies outside a local auto parts store from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

“When I was young, I knocked on doors,” said Jennifer, in her 10th year of scouting. “Now that I’m older, I get too many rejections face to face. People don’t want to buy from a 15-year-old. They want to buy from a cute little Brownie.”

Damn straight. And yes, her cookie selling prowess led to her and members of Troop 813 going to Europe.