One
Ad Age asked marketers in its October 11, 2006 online poll to assess whether Wal-Mart crossed the line with it’s direct to child-customer Christmas website:

Wal-Mart’s launch of a new kind of "wish list" Christmas site for children has drawn the ire of consumer advocates. "If you show us what you want on your list, we’ll blast it off to your parents," says an animated holiday elf named Wally who guides children through a seemingly endless conveyor belt of toys on the retailer’s website. Children who click a "yes" button to have a product e-mailed to their parents hear a round of applause. If they click the "no" button, the rejected toy gets boxed up and unceremoniously sent to a dump truck. The animated Wally, and his elf friend Mary, characters with quirky accents and irreverent attitudes, are also the stars of an upcoming 60-second, 3-D spot that will run in cinemas this holiday season, and they will also appear in TV spots and in a special comic book that will be sent to children who visit the website of the nation’s largest toy retailer. Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood is launching a letter-writing campaign among its 7,000 members asking Wal-Mart to close down the site. "Families have a hard enough time navigating holiday commercialism without the world’s largest retailer bypassing parents entirely and urging children to nag," said Susan Linn, co-founder. "For a company that purports to be family-friendly and promote family values it’s very disrespectful of both parents and children." What do you think?

It’s an interesting question . . . especially for marketers.

Two
On a related note, the American Enterprise Institute’s Nicholas Eberstadt reports steady debt creep among low-income US households:

In the early 1960s, the poorest quarter of U.S. households spent 12 percent more than their annual incomes. In 1973, spending by America’s poorest fifth surpassed their income by almost 40 percent. And in 2004, spending by the poorest fifth of American families exceeded income by a whopping 95 percent; in effect, spending was nearly twice as much as income.
— Nicholas Eberstadt, Washington Post, September 3, 2006

Against the promise of an improving economy and better days to come, who wouldn’t be tempted to spend – or charge – a little more to make the kids happy on Christmas morning?

Three
On a third related note, here is one of the most interesting juxapositions in all the Proverbs of Solomon and friends:

Proverbs 22:6 Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.
Proverbs 22:7 The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.

Tucked somewhere in the overlap of these three items is a nugget of wisdom. I wonder if I could devise a way to mine it, refine it and spend it on gifts this Christmas . . . Just a thought