Girl Scout Cookie sales

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Cookie pickup day is a test of logistics for Girl Scout parents, who fill their cars with as many cookies as they can hold. Bill Chappell/NPR hide caption

Cookie pickup day is a test of logistics for Girl Scout parents, who fill their cars with as many cookies as they can hold.

It's 9:15 on a cold Monday morning, and six Girl Scout parents are giving full-on military op vibes.

Five moms and I are standing on a sidewalk, holding mugs of coffee and tea as we run through logistics. We have an action plan, and a goal: We're picking up nearly 3,300 packages of cookies for our Girl Scout troop and taking them to our homes-turned-mini-warehouses.

"We'll probably need a sort of Checkpoint Bravo, a place to regroup in case we get separated," our cookie manager, Ali Ray Cavanaugh, says.

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Today, we're part of the Girl Scouts Army. We'll drive in a convoy across Washington, D.C., to a massive parking lot where our vehicles — two minivans, two Subarus and two SUVs — will be crammed with as many cookies as they can hold.

As a lifelong fan of Girl Scout Cookies but also a never-scout (a term no one, as far as I can tell, uses), I'm low-key buzzing at being let into the inner circle, where we're relied on to Do The Thing. A successful run today means that all the cookie promises our Daisies, Brownies and Juniors made will be kept, on schedule.

As we head out, I hold two not-necessarily-conflicting ideas in my mind: I'm glad I can do this for my two daughters, and this is one way the Girl Scouts outsources core functions to parent volunteers.

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Thin Mints and Samoas are perennial bestselling Girl Scout Cookies, but Adventurefuls, Lemon-ups and Do-si-Do cookies also have die-hard fans. Bill Chappell/NPR hide caption

Thin Mints and Samoas are perennial bestselling Girl Scout Cookies, but Adventurefuls, Lemon-ups and Do-si-Do cookies also have die-hard fans.

Our cookie pickup objective might sound fun, but we're all about the mission. After all, this task requires at least three hours — and we're taking time away from our (paying) jobs to do this (nonpaying) work.

We have a special group chat for this trip. When we get separated in traffic, we use Google Maps pins and phone calls to ensure our team can recombine before entering the pickup zone. There, we join a snake of cars pulsing down a long incline into a huge lot, where we coil our way between 18-wheelers with trailers full of Thin Mints, Samoas and Adventurefuls.

If you were picturing the Girl Scouts' inner circle like a Wonka-like scene of Tagalong rainbows and Do-si-do stools, this ain't it. It reminds me of large-scale relief efforts I've visited for NPR, where the sole objective is to distribute massive quantities of food. At this one delivery site, 170,000 packages of cookies are being dispersed.

"Last year, our Girl Scouts sold 4.4 million packages across the entire council" in the Washington, D.C., area, council chief financial officer, Jessica McClain, told me.

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