Child soldiers selling cookies at US Naval Air Facility Atsugi

Bah! Humbug! It is my least favorite time of the year: GIRL SCOUT COOKIE SEASON. Yes, that annual parade of unfairness, where the 501(c)(3) corporation known as “Girl Scouts of the USA” reaps the fruits of child labor, while the rest of us have to make do with churlish, expensive adults. Coal mining is just as fun — and far more profitable — than selling mediocre cookies, so why are we other titans of industry left out of the racket?

Apparently, lots of you seem to find this particular form of child labor “cute.” For example, I recently visited the Upright Citizens Brigade Training Center in Los Angeles, hoping to recruit some desperate improvisors to work my mines. Improv folk are not the most muscular bunch, but they seem to enjoy putting in long hours for no pay, so, they’re cheap, if nothing else. But! What did I see? A large table, piled high with 6/10-tasting cookies created by the Pillsbury corporation, and staffed by a gaggle of clearly-bored child workers.

Improv folk are not the most muscular bunch, but they seem to enjoy putting in long hours for no pay

The little biscuit-serfs were so bad at their jobs that the adult overseer spent a great deal of time admonishing them for inefficient workflows, improper cash handling procedures, & a generally unfocused selling attitude. I saw it for what it was: a member of the managerial class correctly rebuking her lazy, entitled workers. Yet, most people around me found this charming! Why, if I employed a raft of urchin miners, and cursed at them for poor pick-heaving & ore-sorting, I’d surely be painted a villain! How in the Hell do the Girl Scouts get away with it?

I am not, of course, advocating that the practice of using underaged slaves to sell mass-produced cookies be abandoned. No, no, far from it! I just want back in on the action. My grandfather’s mines were filled with the cries of hard-working children, raking in profitable coal by the cartful. Why must I settle for creaking, coughing adults? Mass-produced cookies are absolutely terrible for the environment, just like my precious coal, so the product can’t be the problem. And it can’t be job satisfaction, because lots of them seem to hate selling cookies, & depend on their parents guilting their friends to make sales quotas. So, what is it? Is it the uniforms? Coal miners can’t have colorful uniforms! They’d just get covered in toxic coal dust!

What if I get them very pretty hardhats?

No?

Bah!, and humbug once more! Someday, we’ll free those lil’ workers up to take any job they like. For now, I suppose, enjoy your worse-than-homemade child labor treats. I’ll just be over here, whipping improvisors into providing cutting-edge clean energy. Hah! Yah!