Lots of stuff for kids comes in a variety of colors, flavors, shapes, sizes. WHY?????
The answer is simple: TO MAKE MOMS AND DADS GO INSANE.
Let’s start with vitamins. There are four or five animal shapes in the ones we use, and I think the same number of colors. This is great if you have several kids and each one likes a different animal. My youngest only wants the pink “kitty cat” (really, it’s a tiger, but you reason with a two and a half year old). So what do you do with the other 80 vitamins shaped like lions and hippos?
Ice pops: My oldest only wants blue. What about all the other colors? No, I don’t like them! I HATE them!
Dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets. Fish-shaped trout sticks. Water balloons. You name it, the kids have their favorites and stick with them, leaving many a parent bewildered (and perhaps overweight from eating what’s left).
You think maybe the companies could make special versions of their food products which just have one kind? You know, like when the local cable station or movie house runs a Three Stooges festival and advertises that every single short will feature Curly? Why not sell an all-pink-tiger pack of vitamins? Or a an all-stegosaurus pack of dino-nuggets?
I know these guys do tons of test-marketing. I recall a story of how they tested Flintstones Chewables and found that kids did not like Betty Rubble, so she was not in the bottle – until fairly recently, anyway. When everybody hated Jar Jar Binks, George Lucas reduced that character’s role in the second and third parts of his second Star Wars trilogy. Can’t they help me out here with my kids?
They can be this way with clothing, too – that one outfit or color is all they want. In a sense they’ve stumbled upon that same line of thinking associated (rightly or wrongly, I don’t know) with Albert Einstein, who had all his suits the same color and style so he would not have to think about what to wear and worry about more important matters.
This reminds me of a time when my wife and I were traveling cross-country and saw a mom and dad with two small children. We were in a cafeteria-style food court and the mom and dad were rattling off all the fountain drink choices, and the kids, who were clearly tired, simply could not handle the stress of the choices. We really do have to make their decisions for them, once in a while!
The choices kids get sometimes create an illusion of choice, but that’s probably too heavy for a post like this. And I’m not saying we should take things to an extreme like what happened during the Cultural Revolution, where everyone was supposed to wear the same Maoist uniform and not give in to “bourgeois” notions of taste. I just want to know what am I supposed to do with all these purple hippo vitamins and orange ice pops!
Can I sell them on e-bay?