A Girl Scout ‘trunk sale’

Two Girl Scouts from Troop 3431 of Seaford and Wantagh and their mothers, wearing disposable latex gloves, sold cookies out of a trunk at a busy Stop & Shop parking lot just off Merrick Road last Sunday. Shoppers pulled into the lot’s few empty parking spots and hurried inside the crowded store. In the lot, near the store entrance, sat six boxes of cookies beside a blue Honda CR-V with its hatch open and a sign that read “Girl Scout Cookie Sale. $5 per box.”

“Cookies for sale! Girl Scout cookies, last sale for a year!” yelled Lori Swanburg, 49, of Wansers Lane. Most shoppers didn’t break stride. Some didn’t even turn their heads.

Selling cookies out of an SUV isn’t typical, Swanburg acknowledged. Usually Girls Scouts have an official stand on a grocery store sidewalk, near the entrance, which brings more foot traffic. Troops make agreements ahead of time with store managers. Swanburg said that a few days before this ad hoc sale, her daughter’s troop was notified that it could not set up an official stand.

The store manager refused to comment.

“This was our last booth in front of Stop & Shop for the year, and we were told we couldn’t have it,” Swanburg said. “But we’re still here, selling out of the trunk.”

The “trunk” sale wasn’t just the last at Stop & Shop; it was the last sale of the year, period. Usually, the sale period for Troop 3431 runs from the beginning of February to at least the end of March. Sales were cut short due to fear of exposure to coronavirus. But, as Swanburg said, her girls had cookies to sell, and they were intent on showing up on Sunday, with or without an official booth.

“If you do the math, we have 250 boxes at five dollars a box,” Swanburg said. “That’s almost $1,300 worth of cookies we have to sell.”

Her daughter, Cassie, 11, and her friend Adrianna LoBasso, 12, gleefully drew the attention of parking lot passersby on a warm afternoon. “We’re best friends, actually,” Adrianna said cheerfully as she gave Cassie a hug.

Both girls are sixth-graders at Seaford Middle School. As a precaution, the Seaford School District sent students home last Friday afternoon with most of their belongings from their lockers. Swanburg anticipated that that could mean a longer school closure, and she was right: Later that day, Nassau County Executive Laura Curran announced that all schools in the county would be closed through March 27.

“I think we’ll get plenty of rest,” Cassie Swanburg joked. “The quicker we get our online work done, the more time we’ll have to do other things.”

The Seaford district planned to assign work through teachers’ pages on the school website, which will provide links to assignments. “They also have mostly everything they need accessible on the Chromebooks they get to take home,” explained Adrianna’s mother, Melissa LoBasso, 42, of Pine Street.

Although some Seaford parents are working from home, Lori Swanburg doesn’t have that option. She owns an independent bookkeeping business, and visits clients frequently. Her husband, Michael, works for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

“It really is an inconvenience,” she said of the mandatory school closings, adding that she had already done plenty of food shopping to prepare for her daughter’s extended home stay.

After a few minutes without customer, a woman shopper walked over to the opened hatch and peered down. “Do you have the S’mores cookies?” she asked.

“We sure do,” Adrianna answered with a smile. She fetched a box for the woman, who handed over the money and wished the quartet a nice day.

And then it was back to their vocal advertising, because there were still boxes left to sell. Despite the unusual circumstances — selling S’mores, do-si-dos and Thin Mints out of a vehicle, and an impending school hiatus due to a global pandemic — the two girls and their mothers laughed and joked, keeping their spirits high and the cookies moving.