Okay. Stop the bus.
Before I carry on with all the other news and photos and posts and stuff… I just have to tell you what I saw in Ohio last night.
Some of you might ask: “What’s the big deal?” – but for me… the South-African-in-America… it was eerie! And weird… like maybe one of those strange cultural experiences that one has while travelling… like watching people pierce their eyelids in religious rituals… or failing to comprehend why somebody would want to crunch down a pig’s tail… or cringing in awkwardness while women smooch and snot on the glass coffins of blackened, mummified priests… you know? That kind of thing…
An experience that has you both gasping in wonder… whilst simultaneously feeling eerily disturbed…
Can of you remember the scene from Little Miss Sunshine when Richard (played by Greg Kinnear) settled down to watch his daughter compete in a kiddies pageant – only for it to gradually dawn on him what a kiddies pageant actually was? Do any of you remember the expression on his face? Well… last night, that was me.
You may be saying: so tell us, Heather! What’s the big deal? What are you gabbing on about?
The answer: A doll store.
Yip. A doll store. More specifically “The American Girl Doll” Store.
A vast area of pink decor and glass cabinets with an endless range of American Girl Dolls displayed with a baffling array of matching accessories. Never have I seen so many dolls… so many accessories for dolls… so many shoes for dolls, pets for dolls (and never-ending matching accessories for the pets too), cribs for dolls, outfits for dolls… rows upon rows upon rows…. of stuff-for-dolls, overseen by pink-bedecked smiling ladies who stuck star stickers on to the little girls in the store (mine included)… and made sure that excited children didn’t “handle” the merchandise too… “enthusiastically”.
Apart from the dolls, there was an entire section devoted to fashion for little girls AND their “babies”. There were racks of matching accessorised outfits for little girls – and next to each outfit was a miniature, matching version… for the American Girl Doll to wear.
Here’s a photo:
Want a matching pink outfit for you and your doll? It’s all the rage, apparently…
But my mouth-gaping bafflement didn’t stop there. It got freakier.
There was a hair salon. Not for little girls… but for DOLLS.
Here is a photo:
The Doll Hair Salon…
Little girls and their mothers were lining up for this special service. In the photo above, you can see that there’s a display cabinet of different dolls wearing different hairstyles. Once the style is chosen, Mother will fork out $20 (!!!)… and the “baby” is strapped into a pink doll chair, like so:
The stylist will ask the little girl the name of their “baby” – and will actually, uh… talk… to the doll (and it’s “mother”) while styling the hair. Oh – and don’t forget the purple hairdressers sheet-thingy that gets draped around the doll before the styling begins (you can see that two photos above too)…
Creeeeepy!
But, I’m not done yet…
You can also take your American Girl Doll for a bite to eat. There is… a little restaurant in the store too! (100% pink bedecked, of course)… where women, their girls… and the girls’ dolls stop for a bite to eat. There’s even special pink chairs that get attached to the restaurant table (that you can buy for a small fortune). They look like this:
Special chair for Baby to sit in at the dinner table…
I tried to take some sneaky photos of the patrons at the restaurant… all eating with their American Girl Dolls attached to the table on their pink chairs. So – excuse the photos… I couldn’t properly document the situation without being noticed…
A milkshake for this Girl Doll and her “mother”. I wonder if the waitress asks Baby what she would like from the menu?
Okay… so you may wonder – what do these very-average-looking, plastic dolls cost? It’s not like they’re hand-painted, porcelain, collector’s item dolls. They look – to my untrained eye – like your average, plastic, made-in-China doll. I could probably pick up something very similar (although admittedly, without the endless accessory options) from Game in Joburg for… about R150 or – at a push – maybe even R200 (which is about $20).
But no. If you want a “real” and “authentic” American Girl Doll (because – to many people – brands mean everything!)… you will need to fork out about $110 for the basic doll (with one, basic outfit)… and pay a shit-load more if you plan to accessorise… or get it’s hair done at the salon… or whatever. (South African readers – that’s R1200 for an American Girl doll).
Now – this may seem an obscene amount of money (for me) to pay for a plastic doll… but, make no mistake, hoards of women were sweeping through that store with their credit cards and leaving with arms laden with pink bags… bursting with dolls and stuff… for… dolls….
Stuff.
for…
Dolls.
Is it just me? Am I overly weirded out by all this?
Is this just “normal”? Am I blowing it out of proportion?
I get that many little girls (mine included) like pink, glittery things… but stores like these seem to… almost… to pounce on that tendency, and capitalise on it… in order to market mountains of needless crap to little girls who… let’s be honest… will forget most of it in a month – and soon, those super-expensive accessories will be lying under the bed… or broken… or accumulated into yet another toy-box of you guessed it… STUFF!
Needless… meaningless… clutter-inducing… money-wasting… STUFF…
But, maybe it’s different for other folk. Maybe stuff-accumulation is just the order-of-the-day. What do you think?
PS: I had a long talk with Morgan afterwards. She asked why I wasn’t prepared to buy her one of the dolls as a Christmas gift. I told her that she had never wanted a doll… or even thought about a doll… until she entered that store and was bombarded with “want”. Dolls had never mattered to her before… and now, just because she had visited a huge, pink store – she now “wanted” something that she previously hadn’t even thought about (television advertising has this affect on kids too… one of the reasons why we haven’t owned a TV in years). I told her that I was prepared to spend money on something special for her… something meaningful… something that she had genuinely been thinking about for a while. But I’m not buying shit just because we walk into a big store and my kids see things and then – out of the blue – decide that they want them.
PPS: Apparently, you can get the American Girl Doll knock-off from Target… for $20 (and most girls can’t tell the difference).
lol. indeed. Welcome to ‘Merica. It’s creepy weird, isn’t it??? Needless to say Miss Hannah did not have one of the hallowed dolls. 😉
Heh! Thank-you! It was an eye-opener… for sure! 🙂
I’m weirded out too! I have heard of this American doll fad, but have never experienced the store. I am so glad to see I am not alone in my bafflement.
…. I know… that’s what it was: bafflement! And thanks for posting about the Conan piece on my FB timeline. I kinda felt like he did… in need of a stiff drink afterwards! 🙂
Wow, I love this article. I am an American — grew up here — and I have had to separate myself from all this want. As a little girl, I was raised by parents who loved to consume! I just thought it was normal to spend most week-nights and every weekend at the mall, a mall, ANY mall. I was encouraged by my collecting parents to determine what it was I wanted to collect; as if this was a hallmark of adulthood (“So, what do you collect?”) — I could never choose. I remember being little and thinking I had struck on it: a-HA! I can collect… COINS! No… maybe…STAMPS! No…um… uh…. seriously, I don’t really want to collect anything. My mom is a curio cabinet freak. She has like…7 curio cabinets… all full of ceramic dolls, china, whatever…knick-knacks. Ugh. I was just slightly too old when the American Doll phenomenon began (thank goodness). Mom even mentioned that once; “Oh, I would have loved to get you one of those…but you were getting too old when they came out.” I never cared much for dolls. Just never did. I have a niece whose mother did the whole American Doll thing; the tea parties, the accessories, the dolls, the stuff. And now the niece is 13 and doesn’t give a crap about the thousands of dollars worth of stuff in her closet.
I have become kind of an anti-materialist — I still like to get my kids things from time to time, but I focus on things that are useful. More about DOING than having…like, butterfly nets, or crafting kits. We are heavy users of second-hand/consignment shops, and we try to focus on re-using, recycling, and donating our stuff to people who can use it some more. I, too, eschew television…specifically commercials and advertising. We do allow the kids to watch some shows on Netflix (strictly no commercials), but a parent has to be vigilant: many kids’ shows nowadays are out for the sole purpose of hawking spin-off merchandise. I also avoid taking my girls out to any stores. When/if I shop, I typically have a specific thing in mind; if I can’t find it online, I check around to determine where it will be, I call ahead, find out the price, and make sure I can walk in, purchase it, and walk out. I think the more you surround yourself with the shopping lifestyle, the more you find that you *need.* And retailers know that. And kids are hopeless targets. And retailers know THAT. It’s a crazy, materialist world here in the U.S. of A. My thinking is that it will only grow to other parts of the world… unexamined desire for stuff is contagious.
I hear you! For us… the USA has shown us so many things – and taught me a couple of lessons that I couldn’t have anticipated. It’s certainly a great country for a family to have *experiences*… it’s very, VERY diverse… so much to see, learn, do and experience – I love it’s diversity. I don’t like the buy-buy-buy mantra – repeated everywhere… the endless billboards on the interstate highways… the endless commercials on every television… every radio station… everything instructing us to “buy!”. Of course – this isn’t just an “American” phenomenon – but, perhaps more pronounced here? I’m still trying to make sense of what I think of it all… Thanks for connecting and for sharing a bit of your story. 🙂
You have to see the movie ‘Lars and the real girl’ with Ryan Gosling…..(brilliant) it will make you really think. In my opinion
this isnt just about possessions…it tampers with little girls minds.
I’ve been chewing on all of it… I’m such a questioner… I’ve had a bazillion thoughts in my head about all of this… hehe!
Cracking up – from the time I was 7 until I was 13, all I received for Christmas and birthdays were American Girl Dolls and their accessories. I have two who have been resting peacefully with new hair and heads for the last 15 years, until I have children! Similarly, there was a similar craze in Spain during the 70s and 80s with the Nancy doll. People here feel the same as we of the AG generation do about the dolls!
Bwa-ha! Yes – I’m sure there are different weird doll phenomenons in different part of the world. In South Africa, dolls aren’t really a huge *thing*… that’s why I was more-than-just-a-little-bit weirded out by the American Girl Doll experience. I have never been a *doll* person – even when I was a child. So… I just don’t *get* the mania. It all strikes me as very… very strange… hehe!
What stuns and baffles me is that so many people lack knowledge of basic supply and demand economic principles. Of course there’s an entire store targeted and geared toward THINGS little girls want! Comic book stores and video game stores exist too, but I don’t consider those to be predatory. That is how BUSINESS works, believe it or not. While one may not like the idea of his child playing with baby dolls, one should refrain from calling other people’s decisions out as being weird or strange for the sole reason that “they look so creepy!” “They’re hollowed out!” OMG people, they’re DOLLS. Give your daughter a different toy and stop whining whining whining. What a totally contrived article
This post made me laugh (not in a bad way) at how an experience can be totally different based on perception.
I’m in the opposite camp! I absolutely love American Girl Dolls. I got my first, Molly, when I was 8ish. It was the big gift my grandparents gave me (one for my sister, too, and a bike for Caleb), before they retired. My sister bought Kit for me (the blonde “Baby” in the cafe picture) for my birthday years later, using her very own money.
My family definitely did not splurge on American Girl stuff. I got random AG accessories for birthdays or Christmas, but mostly my grandma kept an eye out for doll sized clothes at flea markets, and my mom picked up little jewelry cases and mini furniture from thrift stores that fit our dolls. I always wanted the AG horses with clean lines, but Molly was happy riding some fat brown toy pony I had. Kit played the boy, and she and Molly and my sister’s dolls would pack every bit of their off-brand furniture in a plastic storage bin so they could travel out west in their “covered wagon.”
I loved flipping through the catalogs and circling the things I wished I could get, because the perfect mini worlds of the dolls fascinated me – mini tables and chairs and pets and beds and food. But really we were happy to have dry beans from Mom’s pantry and wooden bowls from Gift & Thrift to serve a meal in their “old-fashioned” world. (It’s one of those experiences where the IDEA of all the stuff is more fun than having the actual stuff. . .)
I’ve been to the store twice. Dad took us for a visit during a trip to New York. It didn’t meet my expectations; I think I expected their worlds to be set up in a gallery like they were in the magazine. We went to the cafe and laughed about how much pink lemonade Dad was sucking down. I was too old to pretend to feed Molly the mini cucumber sandwiches they served. Molly didn’t get her hair done, but I loved the idea of the salon, because once I undid her perfect out-of-the-box braids, I could never get them even again. We went again when my baby sister was 6, and she had fun looking around, but mostly rode the escalator up and down.
Thanks for bringing up all these memories! I am aware there is a consumer driven American Girl market, but they were so much more to me, and I can’t wait to give them to my future babies.
P.S. AG dolls may be overpriced, but the quality is better than the $20 knock-off brands. I’ve always been put off by those! But my eyes were trained through hours and days and weeks and months of creative doll play 🙂
THANK-YOU for sharing your lovely story…. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it! I am a lover of diversity… and so – when stuff (that I find verrrry weird) is thrilling and interesting to somebody else… I am always curious to understand the ‘why’s’ – and to get a *bigger* picture. That’s why I’m so delighted that you shared your story… and it put a huge smile on my face. I could even imagine your Dad gulping down that lemonade… surrounded by all that pink… and I can even imagine Molly – (pouting in my imagination) because she didn’t get her hair done.
I guess part of the reason that I didn’t *get* the American Girl Doll Store… was because I had never seen or experienced anything like that (and certainly not that much PINK) before… in my life. I had this kind of weirded-out zombie reaction to it all. As a child, I grew up on a small farm… always climbing trees, playing in mud, riding my horse… and dolls were never my *thing*. My Christmas present request was always a Beano Annual (a book full of comics about naughty kids like Denis the Menace… the Bash Street Kids… Minnie the Minx… Roger the Doger….). I loved those comics and those stories. My favourite presents from my parents was a trampoline… and a treehouse. And, of course, my piano. I am genuinely interested – and rather fascinated – when folks share stories of THEIR childhoods… and THEIR favourite things and WHY certain things were their favourites. So – in a nutshell – again – THANK-YOU for your lovely response to my ranty-post… I truly loved reading your story! 🙂
Thanks! I’ve enjoyed exploring your blog!