Every year at the beginning of February, Girl Scouts stand outside of local businesses to sell their cookies to loyal customers.

The girls are working hard to learn business management, personal and business finances, customer relations and marketing strategies.

The money the girls earn is for them to go do things like going to camp, or to a water park or even Disneyland.

These 10- to 12-year-old girls stand at a booth sale for three to six hours at a time. Their only protection from heat, rain or wind being a canopy, an umbrella or the building's overhang. And all of this is done with little complaint.

However, as a leader and a member of this community, I am finding the stealing of cookies off of our tables or the deliberate shorting on payment totally unexceptionable!

The cookies are $5 each and every time an individual steals from our girls, the girls still have to pay for the loss. We do not have the protection that businesses do and can not simply write it off.

Each girl is making $0.75 per box they sell. This meas that our girls now have to pay $4.25 for the box of Tagalongs that a young girl and two young men stole from our table at Safeway in Clear Lake.

Several customers at Walmart were trying to “short pay” by rapidly counting ones only to have me discover a "folded" bill in the center. To a 10 year old, it looks like you counted 5 ones.

We are trained as Leaders to allow those who steal from our table to do so and then call the police. The suspect is usually not apprehended due to the girls having a hard time describing the suspect, and again, they have to pay what was taken from them.

I am sending out a plea to all those who would take from a little girl. Please, don't teach them that the world they have to grow up in is out to take everything from them, or that stealing is right. It's not!

But most importantly, stealing from these girls sends them an unspoken message that they are weak and easily taken advantage of. Do you have a daughter? Would you want someone to steal from her and teach her the lesson I've mentioned?

Girl Scouts thanks you for your time.

Lee Whitewater lives in Hidden Valley Lake, Calif.