Sweet treats at the tills

‘CHILD as change agent: the potential of children to increase healthy food purchasing’ is the title of recent research done by Katherine Wingert and a couple of others, funded by the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future ( EurekAlert, October 23 2014).

The report speaks of the power struggles between parent/guardian and child as they move through the grocery store. “Can I have…? Buy me a …? Please mommy pleasepleaseplease… I wantwantwant!!!” If we haven’t got children of our own who have driven us, at some time or other, to unseemly yelling, dragging a screaming toddler by his or her collar, or even a shamefaced slap, we’ve witnessed this behaviour with sympathy.

“Avoiding power struggles in the grocery store with children begging for sweets, chips and other junk foods – and parents often giving in – could be helped by placing the healthier options at the eye level of children and moving the unhealthy ones out of the way,” the report says, with what I can only view as wide-eyed innocence.

“The study, part of a project designed to encourage healthy food purchasing in a low-income neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland, found that many caregivers, when pressed by their children, ended up buying food that they did not intend to buy. To counter this problem, caregivers suggested altering food placement, allowing children to sample healthy food at the store and offering cooking classes to older children.”

And the nation’s supermarkets no doubt are currently holding meetings at boardroom level, where anxious execs pose the anguished question: “How could we have been blind to the impact our merchandising was having on these poor, poor parents? Oh, the guilt I feel for all the agony we’ve inadvertently, unwittingly caused!”

Gimme strength. You noticed that “many caregivers, when pressed by their children, ended up buying food that they did not intend to buy”, huh? This is the whole point of the exercise, folks. Supermarkets and other retailers will use every trick in the book to encourage you to spend beyond your intentions and beyond your means.

Some tricks include:

• Piping the smell of baking bread through the aircon, even though there’s no bakery on the premises (I used to write for an industry mag, many years ago, and this one I heard from the horse’s mouth, a manager who was able to tell me exactly how much his sales of rolls and other baked goods went up as a result).
• Increasing the size of trolleys – the bigger they are, the more you’ll be inclined to toss into them.
• Playing music intended to guide how you buy – that slow tempo stuff makes you take your time, for instance, says one expert.
• Putting the more expensive items at eye-level, while bulk buys are at the bottom.
• Placing that ‘Walk of Death’ at the tills: sweeties, chips, little packets of boerewors, chewing gum. This is at its worst when you are all funnelled into one queue for the cashiers – a perfect opportunity to persuade you into one or two last-minute buys (and by the way, almost all the kind of thing that dieters and mothers of small children want to avoid).

These bright, colourful little items play merry hell with your kids, who are twice as likely to wantwantwant here as anywhere else in the store. (You do know that research shows that warm colours – red, yellow, orange – stimulate hunger? Fast food outlets use this palette a lot, as do manufacturers of sweets.)

And not just kids: I see adults all the time giving in to temptation: “Oooh, a choccie, just what I need as I drag myself through this dreadful queue at the end of a long hard day!” And you chow down on concentrated sugar that you don’t need and will feel guilty about later.

The chances of supermarkets changing the way their stores are arranged, just because some researchers found that it was stimulating more impulse purchases, breaking budgets and driving parents mad – less than zero, I’d say.

I posted the research on my Facebook page, and got groans from a couple of people who find the Walk of Death particularly irritating – wherever it occurs, in music shops, stationery stores and more. But I also got this: “Call me old-fashioned on this, but surely it is up to parents to control their children […] sure there are sweets and treats at tills, but also other last minute goodies like batteries etc. I really think we take the nanny state thing too far.”

I really don’t understand the need for the over-used term ‘nanny state’ here, as no one was suggesting that the state play a role. In fact no one was suggesting anything, other than a naïve hope that supermarkets might, off their own bat, change tack.

But I’m quite ready to make a suggestion now, to get rid of, at the very least, those pernicious racks of sweeties at the tills: parents, launch a campaign! After all, a few religious people were able to persuade stores quite quickly to place girlie mags beyond kids’ eye level; why could a group of harried, angry parents, who’ve had one battle too many with their kids, not fight to get supermarkets and other stores to banish treat-merchandising at tills?

I reckon a few hundred angry people ready to picket and write letters ought to do it. C’mon, let the voice of the shopping public be heard!

 - Fin24