This Is UnAmerican
CNN blogs reports that Girl Scouts booted from cookie corner – founder’s historic house
It’s hard out there for a Girl Scout.
After someone complained about a Savannah, Georgia, troop selling cookies at a busy intersection in town, the city forced the girls to move away from the money-making location, according to the Savannah Morning News. The demand to move broke decades of tradition because that corner – Oglethorpe Avenue and Bull Street – is in front of the historic home of the founder of the Girl Scouts organization, Juliette Low.
Savannah zoning administrator Randolph Scott said the problem was that the girls were setting up their sale table on a public sidewalk, which violates a city ordinance, the Morning News reports. Scott tried to help, calling for a survey in the hopes that the property line near the home had private space. No such luck.
The Scouts are taking it on the chin elsewhere in Georgia and around the country. Recently in Villa Rica, Georgia – about 35 miles west of Atlanta – Girl Scouts were told they could no longer peddle their Thin Mints at a strip mall. (Watch how a cop nearly booted the Scouts from their favorite spot. “He was scaring us,” one of the girls said of the officer.)
This is what happens when you elect Republicans – they want to eliminate anything that looks like the real America and replace it with their fantasy version. Where were the Tea Partiers? What about free markets and free enterprise?
They’ve done their best to destroy Halloween, make Christmas a drag, and now they are going after Girl Scout cookies.
13 comments
OK…now they’ve crossed the line.
I’m sure you can find plenty of examples of this kind of crap from around the country.
I’m also sure that you can find fine representatives of both parties in power both when these UnAmerican laws were enacted and when they were enforced.
Amen, Jill.
Well, Steve, these ordinances have been on the books for decades, and I have lived all around the country [California, New York, Alaska, Florida, Indiana, and Nebraska] and I never heard of it happening before.
People in the country have turned nasty and petty.
My guess is that there is a cookie shop near where these cookies were being sold, and the owner of said business didn’t want competition. It’s the same issue as with the street food vendors in Los Angeles, which are being regulated out of business because the restaurant owners are upset about having competition.
I call it the Texification of government in the United States. The saying in Texas has long been that “the bidness of government is bidness”. That is, government exists to protect businesses, not individuals. And now that notion has been rolled out nationwide…
– Badtux the “We The Corporations(*)” Penguin
(*) Apparently the first three words of the current Constitution read “We the Corporations” rather than “We the People”.
I’m having to wade through the “commemorations” of the sesquicentennial of the “War of Northern Aggression”, despite it having almost totally skipped the state [one battle and one regiment, was Florida’s contribution], because of “heritage”, but they feel free to attack the long standing tradition of selling Girl Scout cookies in front of the house of the organization’s founder. That shows the real level of respect for American history and traditions.
Greed triumphs over everything else.
I would note that down here they sell the cookies at the entrances of most supermarkets, with the permission of the management, because it is not a good idea to be seen as “anti-Girl Scout”.
They do that here in California too. But you can bet that the supermarket chains have crunched the numbers and determined that the Girl Scouts don’t hurt their sales. If the Girl Scouts did hurt their sales, the Scouts would be out on their keisters faster than you could say “Profit!”.
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
I don’t see how it could impact profits as they aren’t selling a directly competing product, and it doesn’t go on for an extended period. I’m sure there is something added to the corporate “good will” account, so it actually increases assets.
Right, which is why I speculated that there must be a cookie store near the place where the complaint was filed against the Girl Scouts. That’s the only kind of store that the Girl Scouts would be a direct competitor to.
Around here we have a lot of good street food, in the form of the “roach coaches” that pop into corporate parking lots all over the Valley to feed hoards of office workers who don’t have time to cook or go out to restaurant. These serve everything, not just tacos and burritos. One of my office-mates loves getting the salads from the truck that stops next door, we have limited refrigerator space so bringing things that need to be refrigerated from home doesn’t really work well. The only reason I think they’re allowed to continue is because the majority of the office workers would not patronize restaurants if they didn’t have access to the lunch trucks, because of time constraints and the horrific traffic, they’d eat sandwiches instead, so the lunch trucks are not really direct competition for restaurants. Thus why no food truck wars like in many major cities…
– Badtux the “Bidness of gumment iz bidness” Penguin
If you own a cookie business that feels threatened by Girl Scout cookies, you should just liquidate and save yourself the aggravation, because you aren’t going to make it in the real world.
Down in San Diego we had the tiny drive thrus on the side of the street selling Mexican for the most part, but there were a few Asian places taking the plunge before Pete Wilson took over from Dukmejian to continue the mess that Republican governors always leave behind. San Diego had some roach coaches downtown, but nothing outside of the central business district.
Someone was doing an Indian lunch delivery service that was used by a few people at the park where I had an office, but they wouldn’t give non-Indians the contact information, so I assume it was not a “regular business”.
Most days I made due with a thermos and a cooler, because “there were rules” about heating appliances and refrigerators in the office park. It was a condo arrangement, and the condo association wanted prevent people from living in their office, like Republican Congresscritters in DC.
On the East Coast you could become a member of a “lunch club” which was family style at a fixed price. That was a good deal as long as you liked Italian or Polish food. They had a menu, like the school cafeteria, but there was no guarantee that it would be followed.
girl scouts! for the win!
I didn’t even get into the fact that the “bad guy” was named Randolph Scott, and the city manager decides that Savannah doesn’t need to be infested with protesting Brownies [and their registered voter parents].
🙂 i’ve always liked the statler brothers.
girl power! a city brought to its knees by brownies! [ok, and parent power, and tourist power too because what tourist destination wants to be labeled as a hater of girl scout cookies?]
Yes, tourist power, as in the Girl Scouts stop mentioning the home town of their founder, and let it be known that Savannah isn’t “Girl Scout friendly”.
Pickets outside of city council meetings would probably draw CNN out of its cave in Atlanta, as these are Girl Scouts, not unionized public employees.