A cookie scoop is not something that is absolutely essential in your kitchen, a spoon works just as well. It's just a nifty little gadget that makes life a little easier. For an investment of $10 or less, a cookie scoop makes portioning out cookies faster, cleaner, and more uniform.
A cookie scoop is like a mini, spring-loaded ice cream scoop. The bowl of the scoop is perfectly sized to make the right size cookie. When you squeeze the handle, a little bar on the inside of the scoop scrapes along the bowl and deposits the cookie dough on the baking sheet (or in an ice cube tray pocket, like for Pick-and-Place Cookies).
There are two main benefits to using the cookie scoop:
1) Your fingers stay cookie dough free, so no need to wash cookie dough off of your hands in between batches of cookies.
2) The cookies are uniformly sized, so baking times are consistent both in between batches, and across an entire sheet of cookies. This is probably the most important bonus to the cookie scoop. It doesn't matter how much of a stickler for perfection you are - you cannot possibly make each and every cookie the exact same size if you are using a regular spoon. This can be a problem if you are baking multiple sheets of cookies at once, as the cooking times will vary depending on the size of the individual cookies. There's nothing more frustrating than a batch of cookies with some overdone, and some not done enough. If you don't bake cookies enough to be a spoon-scooping virtuoso, this issue can be even more exaggerated.
In the grand scheme of kitchen tools, the investment in a cookie scoop is a drop in the bucket. Still, though, make sure you decide based on how much you like to make cookies. You could probably find other clever uses for it in the kitchen, too. Maybe filling tarts, scooping ice cream onto tiny pies...other possibilities are certainly out there!
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