Is there anyone out there who doesn’t love Girl Scout Cookies? Even if you’re like me and dread the aggressive selling practices during Girl Scout Cookie season, chances are you have a favorite that your sweet tooth can’t deny. Alysa Nahmias’s doc Cookie Queens, produced by Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, is charming and disarming in equal measure. Most of us never look past the sweet, saintly smiles of the cookie dealers themselves; we’re too occupied with getting our Samoas fix. Cookie Queens follows the trials and tribulations of four Girl Scouts of differing age, economic status, and ethnicity, as they endeavor to max out their sales totals during the six-week selling period to achieve either personal success or a prize they’ve long been seeking.
All four girls are camera-ready, personable, and charismatic, which doesn’t hurt in making those crucial Thin Mint sales. The oldest is 12-year-old Olive, the highest-selling scout in her suburban Charlotte, NC troop. Then there’s 9-year-old Nikki, a Black girl from Chino, CA who longs to outsell her teenage sisters, Nyah and Nala, top sellers themselves, so that she can afford a trip to Paris. El Paso native Shannon Elizabeth has more modest goals. With the help of her Latinx and Native American parents, who are risking their financial security on this endeavor, Shannon just wants to sell enough cookies that she an go away to summer camp.
Then there’s the real sweetheart of the group, 5-year-old Ara. A tiny go-getter and Type 1 diabetic (meaning she can’t really eat the cookies she sells), Ara pulls her little wagon full of cookies and cheerfully, hopefully peddles her wares to California beachgoers who likely don’t consume any carbs or sugar at all. It’s tough sledding for the child but you’d never know it. She seems just happy to be out there with her father, who helps her out only when she asks for it, or doing other things like kiddie pilates.
Nahmias isn’t breaking the mold stylistically with Cookie Queens; it follows the formula of many festival docs that have emerged over the years. She’s content to put the camera on her young charges and let them do the heavy lifting, because they’ll eventually give voice to the unseemly aspects of Girl Scout Cookie selling that we have questions about. For instance, Olive, clearly media-trained by her well-to-do parents, is dismayed by the low earnings for sellers, and openly questions the profits made by her hard work and those of other scouts. We learn that roughly $800M is made by Girl Scouts of America during cookie season. At the same time, Olive is driven to be the best whether she has misgivings or not. She talks with her friends about upselling, and knows how to sell her cuteness to reach her goals, even if she does consider what they’re doing to be “child labor” in some respects.
While Olive’s family has no problem buying thousands of dollars worth of cookies to sell (a fact I didn’t know, that they have to pay for their own merch), the other girls aren’t so charmed. In the case of Shannon Elizabeth, her struggles to meet sales goals could mean that her working-class parents need to eat the cost of the inventory, and that’s something they can’t afford. The need to sell becomes desperate, even as her parents try to keep that harsh reality a secret.
One can’t help but wonder just how healthy this whole exercise is for children, or if they’re being exploited to help keep the GSA swimming in cookie money. Olive and Nikki, as the two oldest, seem to be hyper-aware that they are being used to some extent. It’s no surprise that both girls eventually show misgivings about continuing on as sellers. If you can face an existential crisis before you’re even a teenager, these girls certainly go through it. In Olive’s case, she doesn’t seem to know who she’d be if she weren’t the top selling cookie dealer. If she lost that, or were to give it up, what’s left for her? That bleak outlook doesn’t last long before she’s back and looking to push her sales totals above 10,000, an insane number when young Ara would be happy just to hit 55 sold.
While Olive emerges as the breakout character because, frankly, she’ll probably be running the world someday, it’s Ara who we cheer on most. She’s the quiet, plucky Cookie Queens champion who at her young age is already making and selling her own diabetic-friendly cookies because the Girl Scouts don’t offer them. It’s her compassionate, entrepreneurial spirit that shines through, and while that is one of the stated goals of the program, we can only hope that more girls like Ara grow up who will seek to make selling Girl Scout cookies fun and wholesome again.
Cookie Queens opens on August 7th from Roadside Attractions.
