They say honesty is the best policy. But for some, that isn’t always the easiest thing to do. Especially when your job is to sell items to other people. It especially feels like a struggle when the goal is to raise cookies for U.S. military troops. So when a young girl scout decided she needed to find a way to sell more cookies, she decided to give people the cold, hard truth about the cookies they could buy.
Charlotte McCourt, an 11-year-old from New Jersey, was trying to find a way to sell more cookies. She had managed to unload 92 boxes, but of those, only 2 were designated for the troops. Buyers of the cookies could designate boxes they bought to be sent to troops.
It was her dad’s bright idea that sparked what came next. “Sean said to her, ‘I have a wealthy friend in Colorado and I texted him and he said he’d donate to the troops but why don’t you write him a letter,'” Charlotte’s mom, Beth McCourt, told ABC News of her husband, Sean McCourt. “Sean gave her his laptop and she took it in her bedroom and wrote and emailed the letter to him.”
So Charlotte sat down and began to write. “I played it by ear and I just kept typing until I thought the letter was good,” she said. “At sales usually I’ll say, ‘This one is my favorite, this one I don’t like as much,’ but I’ve never described them like this before.
The Toffee-tastic is a bleak, flavorless, gluten free wasteland,” she wrote. “I’m telling you, it’s as flavorless as dirt.”
Using a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 as her favorite, she went through each cookie. The highest rating was reserved for Thin Mints – it earned a ‘9’ for an ‘inspired’ combo of mint and chocolate. Giving the Do-si-dos a ‘5’ for being unoriginal, she said the Savannah Smiles had a ‘divine taste’ and gave it a ‘7’.
And since they were honest reviews, there were two she did not rate. “If you have a wild sense of adventure, try the S’mores,” Charlotte wrote of this year’s two new s’mores-inspired cookies. “Full disclosure, I have not tried the S’mores so I cannot rate it in good conscience.” The precocious pre-teen’s letter went viral, after TV/Podcast host, Mike Rowe, shared her email in a video on his Facebook page. Charlotte’s dad works on Rowe’s podcast.
TV/Podcast host, Mike Rowe, shared Charlotte’s email in a video on his Facebook page. Photo by Mike Rowe
Rowe told reporters that he enjoyed the honesty. “In an age of fake news and dubious claims, leave it to a Girl Scout to show us the real value of truth in advertising,” Rowe said. “The simple truth that not all cookies are created equal. The undeniable fact, that some are ‘divine’ and others taste like ‘dirt.’”
Her family expected nothing less from their daughter. “That is who Charlotte is,” McCourt said, calling her “pure” and full of “honesty and humor.” The young girl more than surpassed her goal of selling 300 boxes. After her email went viral, she has now sold more than 25,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies. A good portion of those will be sent to military troops.
For Charlotte, it helped her view the world a bit differently after seeing how people reacted to her email. “It’s honest, nice and it just makes people happy. I think that that’s good to have in a world of war and hate and poverty.” Watch below for the heartwarming, and honest, review from Charlotte.
