Their troop has a policy that the girls get to decide with the amount that comes back to the troop based on their sales. This girl set a massive goal, achieved it and had the troop purchase cookies for her using those funds (a gray area which you learn to find). She couldn’t actually cash out, but the troop can vote and redirect funds. In this case, the troop voted to each use their own earnings for their own projects.
It’s the same here with not being able to return cookies. Actually, all of the cookies we purchased helped my girls’ troops clear out their inventory. What I did was wait until the end of cookie season and the emails saying how many boxes were left. Then I divided the amount according to troop needs (how many cookies they still had available). Fortunately, we were able to help both troops complete their sales AND pick up more cookies to meet the donation amount.
Next year I hope we can repeat this with the goal of buying cookies off troops with less support and fewer sales opportunities. It’s my first year with a troop, so I had no idea how cookie sales work from the top down. There is so much good that comes from Girl Scouts, and I love the budgeting and marketing the girls learned through cookie sales, but I don’t much care for some of the policies surrounding cookies including the hot the troop takes if someone is unable to collect funds or a parent doesn’t pay for cookies.
Okay, I see how you are doing it now and that makes sense. I might suggest that to my girls and see if they would want to get a discussion going with their troops on how to allocate cookie earnings in the future.