Like a Kid in a Grocery Store

I work at a small chain grocery store, one that specializes in "fashion foods" (as my manager told me during my training). As such, it serves a mostly upper-middle-class clientele (which is the same socio-economic group that i have in my youth group), and so, as a true fake ethnographer, I get to see my target in another environment: shopping.

I guess there are many different things I could comment on, especially after pondering the 'To the Best of Our Knowledge' podcast on consumerism a couple weeks ago ("Lost in the Supermarket: Consumerism"). Upon further reflection of consumerism and after observing the ritual of shopping for 4 months, I have come to see how much shopping is really a heart activity.

One piece of evidence I see to support this is how kids acts towards their parents inside the grocery store. I have seen kids, practically from the time they can walk freely, approach their parents innumerable times with something to buy. As an employee this is curious because that is precisely my job. I am to approach customers with things that I think that they might like. We don't work on commission by any means but we are kind of a hands-on grocery store with our customers. So the first time I noticed what was going on was when I started to realize that the kids are doing my job for me.

I am trying to see it from the kid's angle: what are they getting out of this? The parents are usually harried, on the phone, distracted, and a little peeved. By pointing out different items for their parent to buy, the child is requesting that attention be paid to them, but this is valuable attention. If the kid succeeds in their parents buying whatever they just pulled off the shelf to offer them the parent is putting money (and therefore value) in the child and what the child wants. This feels good. Besides the attention and confirmation, let's not forget that the child is actually getting the food item that they wanted as well.

There is also some commentary about capitalism tapping into our need for love and approval that needs to happen here. In college I took all classes that had to do with pop culture, cultural studies, etc. In one of them we were assigned the book Can't Buy My Love by Jean Kilbourne. In the book she highlights how advertising poses their products as the perfect lovers, satisfying what human relationships fail to do. It's convincing.

The back of the book reads: "Many advertisements these days make us feel as if we have an intimate, even passionate relationship with a product. But as Jean Kilbourne points out in this fascinating and shocking expose, the dreamlike promise of advertising always leaves us hungry for more. We can never be satisfied, because the products we love cannot love us back."

Which puts it all squarely in the category of...idols. Of course! We behave the way we do about products - with greed, obsession, discipline in saving, recklessness in not saving - because we are worshiping them. It feels like it, anyways. So what does this have to do with the kids in the grocery store?

Kids connect the products they are persuading their parents to buy with the love that we all associate with those products - obsessive idolatrous love. The kids want to get a piece of the action. We are so in love with the products that we buy that kids sense that there is love to be had there. It's still a good thing to be hit in the cross-fire of love between a parent and a product than to miss out on it all. And also there is a nice feeling of control when the child has influence over the direction of the parent's love. Greed is good when you feel loved by it, the feeling says. And this love for products may be one of the most powerful expressions of love that we observe in a such a capitalistic nation...or at least the most predictable.