Up Next: Chocolate Breast Milk
I originally posted this little ditty on , but I thought it belonged here as well.
I stopped at the grocery store the other day to pick up some diapers. My grocery store has a section called “baby needs,” where all the diapers, baby food, sippy cups, and so on are conveniently located in one place. I usually enter the aisle from the back, but this time I was looking for it from the front of the store. So when I got close, I started scanning the ends of the rows to find the right one. Canned vegetables? Nope, not that row. Boxed convenience foods? Nope. Candy aisle? No, next? Oh wait a minute, there on the sign: Candy, Baby Needs, Cereal. The candy aisle wasthe baby aisle. The shelves on one side held 60% candy, 40% baby goods. The shelves on the opposite side were filled entirely with cereal and other breakfasty processed foods like pop tarts and granola bars.
Upon noticing the arrangement, I immediately remembered reading in a book called by Susan Linn that it is common practice for cereal (and other junk food) manufacturers to plaster their boxes with the images of popular cartoon characters, and for grocery stores to place these items on the lower shelves - at children’s eye level. These manufacturers and others responsible for marketing to children are going for “the whine factor,” meaning that if they can get children to whine for a product, the parents will often buy the product just to shut the kids up. When this is considered, putting these kid-seducing items in the one aisle families with small children are most likely to enter seems elementary. The moral of this story is: if you can’t find the diapers, check the candy aisle.
