Andrew Mendoza, a third-year psychobiology student, was walking down Bruin Walk talking on his cell phone when he heard the siren call that caused him to stop dead in his tracks, temporarily derailing his journey home.
“Last day for Girl Scout cookies!”
The call came from Annette Mercer, leader of Troop 194, who stood behind a veritable fortress of the multi-colored boxes, hoping for reactions like Mendoza’s.
“Hold on, I’ve got to call you back!” Mendoza said quickly, hanging up his phone.
Exchanges like this one have been taking place for the last two weeks as Girl Scout troops from the Los Angeles area, in hopes of capitalizing on college students’ infamously poor diets, brought hundreds of boxes of cookies per day to sell at UCLA.
On this particular day, Mercer brought over 300 boxes, priced at $4 each, to sell in the few hours Troop 194 would be on Bruin Walk.
“I am confident we will run out before dark,” Mercer said as she broke a $20 bill for another student, offering to bag his four boxes of cookies.
Girl Scout troops often set up their booths outside of banks and grocery stores, but Mercer said that at UCLA her troop sells four times what it could in the same amount of time outside a grocery store.
The impending finals week, during which some students have been known to live entirely off of espresso and chocolate, doesn’t hurt sales, either.
“They’re study snacks,” said Jason Avila, a third-year chemistry student, about his five boxes. “This will probably last me about a week.”
Three of Avila’s five boxes were Thin Mints, the Girl Scouts’ best selling cookie. Mercer said that Thin Mints are also the cookies with the second highest sales in the country, after Oreos.
The cookies come from Little Brownie Bakers, a Kentucky-based bakery that has been the officially licensed supplier of all eight varieties of cookies for the last 25 years.
Though the cookies do not contain trans fats, there are 63 grams of fat in a box of Thin Mints, more than twice as much as is in a McDonald’s Big Mac.
One box of Tagalongs, the chocolate-covered caramel and peanut butter cookie, contains 16 cookies and 80 grams of fat.
Despite the high fat content and $4-per-box price tag, cookie season is a highly anticipated time at UCLA.
“It’s something fun to look forward to, but Girl Scout cookie season means it’s time to start putting money aside for the dentist,” Avila said.
The Girl Scouts receive an overwhelmingly warm welcome on Bruin Walk, and Allison Perez, a seventh-grade student at Palms Middle School, said that she loves being on the UCLA campus.
“I like seeing all the older kids going to classes,” Perez said.
Perez said her selling strategy involves “acting cute and being nice” and will help her fellow troop members raise enough money for the camping trip the troop is planning after the cookie season.
“This year we don’t (get) prizes, because we can get those anywhere. Instead we are going to use the money we make to go camping together,” she added.