Gonna hard disagree about this being exploitation of the youth.
Girl Scouts of America is strictly a nonprofit, meaning what excess money they do raise is used to cover running costs of the organization itself and reinvested into various projects within their mission scope, which for the girl scouts, is improving and enable the lives with more opportunities.
Yes, it's true, the troop of the individual girlscout only sees 22% of the sales according to recent figures. This doesn't seem a lot, but really all the girls are doing is going out for 10-20 hours per 'cookie season' to gather orders and then another 10-20 hours to deliver said orders when they are done. From a six dollar box of cookies (tax free!) 22% is $1.32. How many boxes the girlscout sells varies considerably by region and the child, not many figures are publicly available though GSA claims on average they sell 200 million boxes per year. Low end estimates figure even novice girls can get 30 per season with experienced scouts averaging 100-200 with some troops often reporting 300 average or more. If a girl spends 40 hours canvasing the neighborhood and delivering them to sell 200 boxes, thats roughly 5 dollars per hour. Not great but certainly better than other fundraisers some youth partake in.
This gets more difficult to track and balance out now that the girl scouts support and promote online cooking sales, as the above article links, but girls still get credit for these sales despite only posting the url or QR code to attract the sales.
And the cookie program itself takes 24%, or 1.44 per box. This is absurdly cheap, considering it doesn't just cover the cost to bake the cookies, but also package and ship them, at no charge to the youth, even for things such as online orders or direct delivery options they offer now. This is charitable work, but that's still a phenomenally low operating cost.
And yes, the Girl Scouts of America does take 54% or 3.24 per box. This might seem high at first, though you again have to remember their nonprofit status. And unlike the Boy Scouts who are constantly fraught with controversy after controversy due to how the organization is run as well as political pressure from those who should have no involvement with them, the Girl Scouts have a general good reputation if being the younger sibling of scouting organization when we talk about cultural awareness of their activities and how much time the media gives them on average (effectively none) so I can't say I'm that worried that millions of dollars are being funneled into some directors pocket tax free when the worst thing people say about them is they are a cookie salesperson masquerading as a scouting organization.
The GSA invests heavily in programs and facilities used by the Girl Scouts themselves, as well as doing outreach programs for generalized youth to be given opportunities on top of supporting nationwide efforts to support troops in lower income areas that can't fundraise to the same level as those in richer areas.
And my own person input here, as a former Boy Scout that made Eagle Scout: GSA does brand recognition so damn well that it's incredibly easy and low stress to sell those cookies. We as the boy scouts did multiple fundraisers a year, from popcorn (the traditional yet lesser known counterpart to GSA Cookie sales) to pizzas and utensils to even trying to sell camping related gear one year. Everyone knows the Girl Scout cookies, everyone wants to buy them and in most scenarios a girl just has to show up with the ordering brochure and a smile and people interested in buying them will immediately scramble to order what they can. I'm not faulting the GSA or girls in this scenario, I'm envious because as a Boy Scout we were always envious of that simplicity when trying to pitch our own fundraisers to the local community and I can't count how many times I was told to my face to come back with the cookie sale.
So TL;DR, yes the GSA takes the largest cut, but they are also doing most of the actual work involved in producing and shipping the cookies at no charge to the girls, something most fundraisers that sell food DO NOT do, and the girls just have to do the legwork to find mostly willing customers and ensure the cookies get delivered. Compare that to any job that pays a commission for selling items and anyone who does those types of jobs would literally kill for 22% of the total cost of each sale.
