Steering clear of kid-friendly shopping carts
Monday, March 28, 2005 at 03:19PM Connect child and friendly with a hyphen and you’re asking for trouble. At least that’s been my experience.
Take, for example, child-friendly shopping carts. If you’ve been in a grocery store recently, you’ve surely seen them. They’re the suped up carts that are all the rage among that key grocer demographic: toddlers.
In most cases, they take the form of plastic race cars, attached to the fronts of standard-size shopping carts. If you’ve never seen one, you can check out the latest model of the “Bean” cart, manufactured by Salem, Mass.-based McCue Corp. by clicking here. As McCue’s website announces, these carts deliver “60 smiles an hour.” Cute.
Of course the demographic being served by these steering-wheel equipped carts is not really toddlers, but exasperated parents desperate to keep their kids entertained – and contained. The theory being, if the tykes are happy, the parent who has dragged them along to the grocery store will have a more relaxed, enjoyable shopping experience and, in turn, will be inclined to spend more.
According to this February 5, 2003, DuluthNewsTribune.com article, market analysts have calculated that parents tend to spend 10 to 40 percent more if the kids are with them and in a relatively good mood. And the number goes even higher when dad does the shopping.
This theory was put to the test this past weekend, when Mommy asked me to join her and The Toddler on their weekly trip to the grocery store. Upon entering the store on a busy Saturday afternoon, there was a noticeable shortage of carts. That’s when Mommy spotted it, parked alluringly in its own private spot, the empty miniature race car/cart.
Mommy eyed me, cradling The Toddler in my arms, pointed at the kiddie car/cart and asked, “What do you think? Should we try it?”
And I shrugged and gave the naïve dad response that I would end up regretting for the next three long hours, “Sure.”
Pushing a kiddie car/cart around a busy grocery store I found about as relaxing as teaching a 15-year-old how to operate a stick shift in rush-hour traffic.
As the DuluthNewsTribune.com article I referred to earlier notes, a full-size shopping cart with a plastic racer jutting from the front end easily becomes an aisle-hog. They should have an Oversized Load banner attached to them. At least in the store where we shopped most aisles were so tight that you couldn’t squeeze past a non-racer car/cart. And they’re about as easy to steer as a big rig. The result was that I tended to steer clear of all aisles while Mommy hauled armloads of groceries up and down the aisles.
So you’re probably thinking right now, what about The Toddler? Did he at least enjoy riding in this suped up cart? The answer, of course, is yes. But it’s a qualified one.
Yes, The Toddler seemed to be overjoyed at being Speed Racer in the grocery store. The catch is, all good things must come to an end. In this case, the end comes rather abruptly, at the check-out counter. There is a warning on the race car-shaped grocery cart that it is to be used only inside the store, which means that all of your groceries have to be transferred to a regular cart if you’re going to get them to your car outside. That also meant that The Toddler had to be removed from a place where he was perfectly content.
Rule No. 1 of Parenting: If you have a perfectly content toddler, don’t do anything to disturb that. Like removing a toddler from that “child-friendly” shopping cart.
You see, the child-friendliness claim should come with a proviso – it only lasts as long as the child is in that cart. The moment he is taken out of that cart, his personality takes a U-turn. All the way from the grocery store to the car, The Toddler beat on Daddy as if he were a punching bag. For much of the rest of the evening until the checkered flag was finally waved and he mercifully went to sleep, an elapsed time of approximately two and a half hours, he cried.
The next morning was Easter and the prior evening’s tantrum was seemingly lost in a haze of egg-hunting, bunny cookies and imitation grass. Thankfully, the Easter bunny didn’t hop into a grocery cart.
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