Zombie Nation 2007

Here’s a rather disturbing article found in the Detroit News today:

TV shopping carts capture kids’ attention

Shopping during the holidays is stressful enough without tired kids in tow. But this season, colorful plastic carts with TVs screens are the latest incarnation of a trend toward providing entertainment for captive customers, joining TVs at checkout lines, gas station pumps and hair salon stations.

The TV Karts show videos of Bob the Builder, Barney or the Wiggles for as long as parents shop. After rolling the carts out last year, Meijer now has them stocked in most of its 181 Midwestern stores, including nearly every store in Michigan.

So, is anyone as disturbed by this as I am?

At face value, this seems rather innocent: keep a kid entertained by showing them a video in a shopping cart.  But if you look at this a little closer, you can see that this is yet another way to stick advertising in our faces.   The programmers know that the parents will glance down when they hear or see something interesting.  Advertising isn’t the real problem, though: this is just one more way to turn our kids into TV-addicted zombies.  It’s bad enough that today’s teens grew up with television as a babysitter, but now the greedy mass media has found a way to infiltrate our privacy even when we go out shopping.

Whatever happened to talking to your kids while you’re out shopping?  I always took my kids along shopping with me, and never hesitated to point out something amusing or interesting on the shelves, ask them to identify words, or (as one good example) in a grocery store, explain why we were buying something that, to them, looked boring.  I know, corn starch isn’t the most exciting thing in their world, but once they saw how it worked the next time I made homemade gravy, they would at least know the mechanics involved.

Oh, wait, I forget: most moms these days are too busy yacking it up with their girlfriends, or chewing out their significant others, to be bothered with actually watching what their kids do while at the store.  Yeah, that’s it.  You now, the lady with three kids under six years old, all of them running amok through the store while she mutters a feeble “Stop that!” to them in between her phone conversation.

Anyway, I’ve gone off course.  But you get the idea: TV as babysitter.  Does anyone wonder why we can’t “reach” our kids anymore?  What is the future going to be like–will we actually have to get courses in schools to teach our kids to actually communicate with each other?

But wait, it gets worse…

Improved technology and falling prices of light emitting diode screens have opened new possibilities as retailers and marketers look to snag the attention of an increasingly fractured market.

Gas Station TV, out of Oak Park, capitalized on the strategy of giving information to customers while they fill their tanks. Focusing on customers at a “natural pause point,” the company sets up screens that play a loop of sports, weather, news and, of course, commercials at pumps, and they are now running in major markets nationwide.

The service is subsidized by the ads and free to gas stations. It operates more than 5,000 digital screens in 300 cities, including at 48 stations in Michigan. The company plans to install another 7,000 displays by the end of 2008.

And furthermore:

Shopping during the holidays is stressful enough without tired kids in tow. But this season, colorful plastic carts with TVs screens are the latest incarnation of a trend toward providing entertainment for captive customers, joining TVs at checkout lines, gas station pumps and hair salon stations.

How nice–now we can’t even go shopping, get a haircut or pump gas without TV staring us in the face.  I’m happily divorced from a TV addict, and when my kids come over here, there is NO TV, outside of their limited selection of DVDs and video games.  They prefer to do other things than stare at a screen all day long, and I’m thankful for that.  We make weekly trips to the library, we do things together at home (cooking, making crafts, playing games, etc.)…actually using their minds and interacting.  TV isn’t on our schedule.  That’s how I was raised…but then again, I never liked TV all that much anyway.

I really have to question the businesses that feel as though they hvae to shove video in our faces any time we go somewhere.  I already have to tolerate (attempt to ignore) daytime trash TV when I got to the doctor’s office.   Some restaurants need to have a TV blaring during every open hour.  Why do I want to go to a hair salon and not talk to the hairdresser–has interpersonal interaction become passé?

Well, maybe not.  “Texting” is another curse…

“Where’s it going to stop? Are we any more satisfied now than in the past? I know that students sit in my class now and 25 percent have the (computer) screen up, and they’re text messaging, they’re on MySpace, they’re doing all sorts of things. I know they’re not in my class. That’s what we’re competing against.”

I know this for a fact: a friend of mine in her 40s is going back to school to finish out a degree, and her 20-something classmates get reprimanded often for texting in class.  So much so, that the school is talking of installing “jammers” during the next semester since it is so distracting.  More power to ’em!

It’s like this nation of ours is turning into a nation of zombies.  Consumers should not have to tolerate all of this intrusion into their privacy, nor endure yet another distraction, especially when you realize it is nothing more than corporate greed putting itself literally into our faces.  The attention spans of youngsters has gotten worse because TV has become so invasive in our culture.  It’s not entertainment anymore–it’s a lifeline.  An addiction.  And of course, it’s all about advertising anyway.