Why We Buy (17 page)

Of course, we boomers are born technocrats, but who knows what new marvels will exist to intimidate us three decades from now? New technologies usually bring benefits that are perfectly suited to the older shopper: Internet shopping and e-mail make it easy if you can't get around like you used to, and the pocket PCs of the future (like today's BlackBerries and iPhones, only better) will have plenty of memory for the times when yours fails, like when you need a phone number or you're standing in the middle of the supermarket and can't remember why.

But look at how technology is marketed and sold—you'll never see anybody over thirty in an ad or behind the counter of a store. And the product itself is unfriendly to older users, from the miniature keyboards to the type design on websites to the frequency with which printer and computer on-off switches are located in the back. Maybe some of high tech's appeal is lost when it's easy enough for your grandmother to use. But a couple decades down the road, when
we're
the grandmothers, there's going to be hell to pay.

W
ith gender revolt (or reconfiguration, at the very least) having changed so much about our lives, and men and women off boldly shopping new terrain, the effect on children today is quite simple: Kids go everywhere.

Where did they ever go? To school, of course, which left their mothers free to perform the myriad tasks of the domestic superintendent, high among them the acquisition of food, groceries, clothing and other supplies and services as needed. Dad bought booze, tires, cigars, lawn-mowers, groceries (maybe once or twice a year) and Mom's birthday gift. Banking was done by either mother or father, depending on the household's particular division of labor. Only major purchases required the presence of the entire family, but how often did anyone get a car or a couch? Not so often that the children who came along for the ride required very much in the way of accommodation.

Today, both parents are almost certainly working at jobs, which means buying that cannot be done over lunch hours must take place during times the family might happily spend together. Shopping then
becomes an acceptable leisure outing—less pleasurable, perhaps, than a week at Disney World, but not entirely without potential for fun, as we'll see. Also, divorce is common enough that the single parent (either one) in the company of the brood is a common sight in movie theaters, restaurants and stores. On any given Saturday afternoon, is there a Cold Stone Creamery or game arcade in America that goes unvisited by divorced dads with their weekend-custody kids? Kids go everywhere because we take them, but once there, they alter the shopping landscape in both obvious and subtle ways.

The older we get, the more we recognize that the ownership of any product, no matter what it is, isn't transformative. That dress, that lipstick, that iPod nano is not going to change you or anyone's opinion of you. The aging consumer is also better at ignoring pop-up ads online and TiVo-ing their favorite programs so they don't have to watch five annoying commercials in a row. Thus, the twenty-first-century marketer is focused on kids and teens. It's no surprise to note that the average four-year-old American child can identify more than one hundred brands.

There is also the fact that our children consume even more mass media than we adults do, much of it vying to sell them things. The marketplace wants kids, needs kids, and kids are flattered by the invitation and happy to oblige. They idolize licensed TV characters the way their junior forebears once were taught to worship patron saints, and they manage to suss out the connection between brand name and status at a very early age. It's just one more example of how capitalism brings about democratization—you no longer need to stay clear of the global marketplace just because you're three and a half feet tall, have no income to speak of, and are not permitted to cross the street without Mom. You're an economic force, now and in the future, and that's what counts.

All this, like every major upheaval, is both boon and burden. In practical terms, it means three things:

1. That if a store is somehow unwelcoming to children, parent shoppers will get the message and stay away. I can't tell you how many stores that depend on female customers fail to ensure that all aisles and paths between racks and fixtures are wide enough for a baby stroller to pass.
If they're not, at least half of all women in their twenties and thirties will be shut out at least some of the time. (A great many men shoppers will be, too.) We did a job for a department store and determined, using a tape measure, that the baby and children's clothing section was more crowded with racks and fixtures than any other part of the store. As a result, it was the most difficult part of the store to navigate if you were pushing a stroller; it was also the least-visited section of the store, which was no coincidence. Every year, Hallmark spends a small fortune on TV commercials for the Christmas ornament sections of its stores. In one prototype store we studied, the fixture sat on a narrow aisle. Every time a shopper with a stroller ventured there, the section was totally blocked off. As a result, our research showed, only 10 percent of the store's shoppers ever saw the ornaments. By store design and fixturing alone you determine whether you will be kid-friendly or kid-avoidant: Automatic doors, wide aisles and no steps make it easy on parents pushing prams or dragging (or chasing) toddlers.

2. That children can be counted on to be enthusiastic consumers (or co-consumers) as long as their needs have been considered. In other words, if you want to sell something to kids, you've got to put it where they can see it and reach it. That goes for obvious items, like bubble bath in an Arthur-shaped container, but also for things like dog treats, as I explained in an earlier chapter, since children (along with old people) are the main market for liver-flavored cookies. Conversely, if you don't childproof the store the way you would your home, you'll be in for many unhappy surprises.

3. That if the parent's sustained close attention is required (by, say, a car salesman or a bank loan officer), then someone must first find a way to divert the attention of a restless, bored child.

 

The first time I paid practical attention to the effect of children on the “adult” world was not in any retail emporium but in a temple of culture, the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia. I was wandering among the great one's larger-than-life bronzes, lost in aesthetic reverie, when I heard a young voice exclaim, “Look, Mom—a bottom!” I turned to see
an angelic tyke gripping with both little hands the buttocks of Balzac.

I then gazed around the room and noticed that there were touch marks on all the statues, roughly at the height where this adorable child had grabbed poor old Honoré. Clearly, this little fellow was not the only touch-oriented art connoisseur in America.

That moment illustrated several truths about children. First, they are exuberant participants in the world of objects. If it is within their reach and it offers even the slightest inducement, they will touch it. A child's creative impulse is expressed in his or her search for the essential toy-ness in everything, from the most mundane objects to the loftiest. An ironing board? That's a toy. Balzac's butt cheeks? They're a toy, too. I realized that if you want children to touch something, you must only put it low enough, and they will find it. In fact, objects placed below a certain point will be touched by children
only.

Supermarkets have been at the forefront of exploiting the hands-on shopping style of children. We have countless videotape moments showing kids in grocery stores begging, coaxing, whining, imploring Mom or Dad to choose some item (and when that fails, simply grabbing it and tossing it into the cart). If it's within their reach, they will touch it, and if they touch it, there's at least a chance that Mom or Dad will relent and buy it, Dad especially. Even this must be done with care, though—we once studied a market that had placed products with kid appeal on the bottom shelf, not realizing that for children riding in shopping carts, the shelf just below the middle one is ideal.

Supermarkets have gotten so good at appealing to children that parents are in semirevolt. In response to complaints about the candy and gum racks by the cashiers, some markets have begun to offer candy-free checkouts. (Now the confectioners are complaining.) We found an alarming trend in a study a few years back: a growing number of parents who assiduously steer clear of the cookie and cracker aisle in order to spare themselves the predictable youthful hue and cry. To counter that maneuver, our cookie manufacturer client began securing strategic adjacencies—with appropriate aisle partners (cookies on one side of the aisle and baby food on the other, for example) to guarantee that one way or another, families will have to confront chocolate chips.

In the '80s, General Mills devised a new product for callow palates: a microwave popcorn that came in different colors. They advertised the stuff heavily on kiddie TV, but then—in a classic example of the merchandising hand not knowing what the marketing hand was doing—failed to make sure it was being displayed within reach of its intended consumers. In fact, assuming that parents would do the buying, the firm's typical supermarket planogram had positioned it on the high side, and this, we felt sure, was to blame for the product's disappointing sales. We still show clients the video of a boy of six or so making repeated flying leaps at the shelf where the popcorn was kept, trying to knock one to the floor so he could show it to Mom. He finally got it down, but his mother refused to allow it in the cart. Dejectedly, he put it back on the shelf—not where it had been, but down at
his
eye level. And sure enough, the next kid who came by saw it, grabbed it and tossed it into Dad's cart, where it remained. A classic moment in the wisdom of watching the shopper.

It would be almost impossible for families to shop together if not for the advent of kid-friendly dining, and McDonald's, more than anyone, has prospered from this—the restaurants are part convenience, part bribery for the little citizens if only they'll behave through a morning at the mall. McDonald's realized early on that if it could appeal to children—through its menu but also with the toys and licensed character cups and playlands—it would get the parents as well. It's no coincidence that America's dominant fast food is also the favorite among kids. But even McDonald's doesn't get everything right. One glaring omission: The counters are all too high for children to use. A seven-or eight-year-old is certainly capable of going alone from table to counter to order more fries or another soda. But the design of the restaurants forbids it. Even the menu boards are so high that only an adult can comfortably see them. There should be kid-level menus that employ large photos of the food and as few words as possible.

I have my own personal kids-in-a-restaurant story. As I mentioned earlier, for a time I was one of the owners of a downtown New York bar and restaurant known as the Ear Inn. When we first bought the business, the bar was patronized mostly by aging printers and longshoremen—a
rough-and-tumble blue-collar crowd. As the new owners, we were interested in reaching out to the homesteaders, artists and young families who were slowly moving into our industrial neighborhood, located only a block and a half from the Hudson River. We also needed to raise the prices, and to do that we had to—gently, unassumingly—change the makeup of the Ear's customer base. Our solution? We put paper and crayons on every table and at happy hour we invited our preferred patrons to set their kids loose inside the bar so that Mom could cook dinner in peace at home while Dad nursed a beer and kept watch. Thus, beginning at about five in the afternoon until after eight, the Ear Inn had a huge posse of toddlers and small kids underfoot. Happy hour became all about being happy, and not about scarfing down as many whiskey sours as you could. The longshoremen and printers disappeared. These weren't people you wanted to annoy, but they were scared off or turned off or both.

What we could never have foreseen was how the presence of children protected us in other ways. Almost every other new bar owner reported having trouble with the local mob: protection money, payoffs for garbage, staged fights, bookies camped out in their telephone booths jotting down bets. The Ear somehow steered clear of all these issues. Most mysterious.

In the ensuing years I got to know some of the neighborhood wiseguys. Two guys from that era of my life are now doing hard time in prison. Others I still see on the street and am always glad to run into. Even now I joke that if I ever needed someone whacked, I'd know where to go. One night about ten years ago I was walking down the street when I ran into, well, let's call him Tony. We retired to a local bar for a few drinks and a lot of talk about the old days. I asked why we got left alone.

“Paco, it was the friggin' kids. Three times someone was supposed to have a little talk wit you guys, but we walk in and you got old ladies and kids in the bar; we could do nothing.
Nothing.
”

Amazing what paper and a whole bunch of crayons can do for you.

 

No, you're not dreaming: There are more kids in bookstores today than ever before. Once, the children's books section consisted of a few shelves stuck way in back, behind the dictionaries. Today it may be the best-looking, most inviting part of the store.

Here's how smart booksellers stock the shelves: They place the books featuring characters from popular TV shows down low, so the little ones can grab Bratz, SpongeBob or Fairly OddParents unimpeded by Mom or Dad, who possibly take a dim view of hypercommercialized critters. Children's classics—
Grimm's Fairy Tales, The Little Prince
or anything that seems old and wordy—are displayed high, at eye level for adults, since that's who'll be choosing those worthies. In the middle go the books and characters whose appeal spans generations—Babar, for example, or
Curious George,
or Dr. Seuss. (DVD planograms should work the same way bookstores' do: the venerables that parents might choose—
Old Yeller
or
The Wizard of Oz
—displayed high, and contemporary favorites like
High School Musical
or
Hannah Montana
down where children can grab them and commence their noisy yet still somehow charming pleas.)

We always advise our bookstore clients to group sections by gender, acknowledging the tendency of men to cluster in sports, business, do-it-yourself and computers while women troll psychology, self-help, health, food, diet, home and garden. Place the children's books within sight of those women's sections, we counsel—and use low shelving for the kids, so that mothers can browse their books and look over from time to time to keep an eye on the children.

At the Barnes & Noble superstore near my office, there's a kiddie section with lots of miniature seating, which is good, but it ignores the fact that most children are accustomed to being read to while sitting in a parental lap. I'm always tempted to grab one or two of the large armchairs from elsewhere in the store and drag them into the kiddie section.