Name: This San Bernardino Girl Scout shattered a US record in cookie sales
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This San Bernardino Girl Scout shattered a US record in cookie sales

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By | Lilly Bumpus wrote a letter at the beginning of Girl Scout cookie season explaining how those who buy boxes from her will not only be helping her raise money, but helping her achieve her dreams.Two months and tens of thousands of sales later, the record for most boxes of Girl Scout cookies sold in a single season belongs to the 8-year-old from San Bernardino.“She showed our community and the world it’s more than just buying cookies or buying a product,” Trish Bauer, Lilly’s mother, said this week. “It’s supporting someone’s dream. Whether it’s a business owner or an 8-year-old girl slinging Girl Scout cookies, Lilly encouraged people to support a dream and a mission, not just a product.”Lilly, a brownie in the Girl Scout ranks, beat Ewing’s Sarcoma as a toddler and has blossomed into , an outstanding student and a cancer advocate. Her award-winning provides families emergency financial assistance and covers funeral expenses.Every year, Lilly, her mother, her grandparents and scores of volunteers spend the holiday season for children across the country battling pediatric cancer.Come February, the pint-sized entrepreneur hawks Girl Scout cookies.On Monday, March 22, Lilly’s troop, comprised mostly of cancer survivors, girls still battling the disease or girls who have lost a loved one to the fight, gathered outside her San Bernardino home to surprise her with an unveiling of her new record.32,484.“A lot of people approached us saying we must have gotten big businesses or sponsors to buy from us, or big donations,” Bauer said. “The biggest order placed was 100 boxes. Lilly reached 32,000 boxes out of everyone seeing value in buying one box, two boxes, four boxes, and everybody working together to try to be a small piece of a really big puzzle.“That, to me, is magical.”Due to the , Girl Scouts this year were not allowed to set up booths in public places or go door-to-door selling their neighbors’ favorite seasonal snack, Bauer said.With COVID-19 still ravaging the region, girls who normally spend the bulk of February and March walking around with wagons full of Thin Mints, Caramel deLites and Do-si-dos had to rely on online purchases and deliveries.“It’s been an insane season,” Bauer said.For her part, Lilly went live on her popular Facebook page “almost every day,” Bauer said, answering visitors’ questions and giving her honest opinion on cookie flavors. (Lilly’s a Girl Scout S’mores devotee.) The girl “challenged people from where they were to look outside of the box,” Bauer added, and not see their purchase as helping her, but helping children around the country battling cancer.Orders poured in.&nbsp;For more than two months, Lilly and her parents delivered cookies before and after school. In the evening, Lilly hopped on social media to write about her day and respond to comments.She then would set up a booth outside her home until sunset.“Lilly has always been blessed with the community of supporters she’s had with her,” Bauer said. “But for the first time, the world saw she had her own voice, her own mission, her own site that is bigger than cancer.“She just needed a space to do her own thing, and this was it.”Earlier this month, Lilly learned she had sold about 15,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies. A few thousand more, she was told, and she would own the record for most boxes sold in a single season.Within four days, Bauer said, her daughter had moved 10,000 additional boxes.With about a week remaining in the season, Lilly learned she in fact needed to push a couple thousand more to break the reported record of 26,086, set not long ago by a New Jersey Girl Scout.On Sunday, March 21, Lilly set the new mark: 32,484 boxes.“She sold her freaking heart out till the last day of Girl Scout cookie season,” Bauer said. “We boothed 11 hours straight outside our house and sold 500 boxes in one day. It’s Lilly being Lilly. She does not like somebody telling her something is not possible.“When I told her at the beginning of the season how tough it would be to sell this year, she told me, ‘Nothing is impossible if everybody chose to make it possible.’”While there is no official prize for breaking such a record, troop leader Janice Desforges said she and others intend to reach out to Guinness World Records to see if Lilly’s mark can be recognized.“It’s a phenomenal number,” Desforges, a longtime Girl Scout parent, said of the brownie’s record. “I know how much work selling takes. No matter what your niche is, she did it all.”Lilly and her parents have a world map that shows where their cookies went this year.Boxes from their San Bernardino home have landed in all 50 states, Bauer said, as well as Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, Egypt, Paris, Rome and everywhere else in the world except Africa.While proud of where she sent them, the young record-breaker said she is infinitely more proud of who has received them and who will shortly.Lilly gathered 5,200 donated boxes of cookies, Bauer said, and will distribute 1,000 each to the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, Loma Linda University Children’s Hospital and the Children’s Hospital of Orange County. In normal times, Bauer said, Lilly would wheel her wagon door to door and let patients choose their flavors.This year, however, Lilly bought each hospital its own wagon for a staff member to fill her role.Donated boxes also will be included in care packages for hospital patients in New York and Texas, and more than 1,000 boxes will be airdropped to troops overseas, Bauer said.Another 1,000 will go to homeless individuals.“It feels like the world believes in me and it feels really good,” Lilly said. “It means so much to me that people are coming to support me by buying cookies.”In addition to boxes of cookies, Lilly is donating most of the money she raised from her record season to childhood cancer research and to a group that feeds the homeless on Skid Row in Los Angeles.Such a donation to Skid Row, Bauer said, is expected to feed those there for a whole year.“Childhood cancer is the lowest funded cancer research,” Lilly said, “but it’s really sad to me because it’s really hard going through something like that. One of the reasons I’m donating to childhood cancer research is because I went through it. It’s hard, and I thought I could change this just with a box of cookies.”Really 32,484 to be exact.“The reason I wanted to beat the record,” Lilly said, “is because I wanted to help all kinds of Girl Scouts in the world and tell them they can do it just like I did.“I just wanted to be inspiring,” she added. “I wanted to help.”We invite you to use our commenting platform to engage in insightful conversations about issues in our community. We reserve the right at all times to remove any information or materials that are unlawful, threatening, abusive, libelous, defamatory, obscene, vulgar, pornographic, profane, indecent or otherwise objectionable to us, and to disclose any information necessary to satisfy the law, regulation, or government request. We might permanently block any user who abuses these conditions.Get Morning Report and other email newslettersFollow UsMost PopularClose

By | Lilly Bumpus wrote a letter at the beginning of Girl Scout cookie season explaining how those who buy boxes from her will not only be helping her raise money, but helping her achieve her dreams.Two months and tens of thousands of sales later, the record for most boxes of Girl Scout cookies sold in a single season belongs to the 8-year-old from San Bernardino.“She showed our community and the world it’s more than just buying cookies or buying a product,” Trish Bauer, Lilly’s mother, said this week. “It’s supporting someone’s dream. Whether it’s a business owner or an 8-year-old girl...

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This San Bernardino Girl Scout shattered a US record in cookie sales

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