Norah Carroll

Yesterday I wrote about Silicon Valley Girl Scouts using a Square card reader to sell Girl Scout cookies. Well, it looks like they’re not the only troop going mobile this year! Read below for information on how San Diego troops are pairing iPhones, a Mophie card reader and Intuit software to make their sales.

fastcompany:

Ha ha ha, YES! Soon we will be able to eat all the Girl Scout cookies to our heart’s content. Give me like twenty boxes of Thin Mints, now.

Girl Scouts have been in the U.S. for 99 years, and for over 80 of them the Girl Scout Cookies program has been an important vehicle for raising funds—the Scouts call it the “largest girl-led business in the country” which “generates immeasurable benefits for girls, their councils and communities nationwide.” It’s certainly a large-scale program—it generates some $700 million in revenues. But it’s also a program that’s been bound by tradition, but is now adapting to our contemporary digital lifestyle: Starting this week a number of troops in San Diego are accepting credit card payments via iPhones.

Yup—it’s true, you’ll soon not be able to use the excuse “I don’t have any cash on me, sorry!” when the Girl Scouts come a-knocking with their sugary wares. Groups of them will be toting iPhones wrapped in Mophie’s Marketplace credit card-reader case and running Intuit’s GoPayment system, turning each Scout vendor into a tiny, mobile credit card processing machine. We’ve written about both of these companies before—together they act in a similar way to Jack Dorsey’s Square system, letting iPhones read credit cards via a plug-in peripheral and process the transaction through a secure app. When you buy cookies you’ll swipe your card, then be required to sign your signature with your finger on the touchscreen.

“I don’t have cash on me” is never an excuse, instead a cold, cold reality that we’re now thankfully free from. I love you, technology.