Mall Accidentally Corners the Toy Scene
Children ricochet from store to store like steel balls in a pinball machine. Ping! Disney. Ping! FAO Schwartz. Ping ! Sesame Street.
One child in the Sesame Street store at South Coast Plaza starts wailing when his mother grabs a toy from his hands and puts it back on the shelf.
But when she says, “We’re going to go to the Disney store now, let’s go to the Disney store,” he quiets down.
Three minutes later, a woman comes out of the Disney store with her two kids. “How much was the dog, Mommy?” one asks. “Expensive,” the mother says sweetly.
This is a mall that boasts of being at the cutting edge of retailing. This is a collection of stores whose managers beg to be compared not to some mall out in the middle of East Nowhere but to a fashionable downtown shopping district in a sophisticated city. And now, this is a mall where people shopping for children are in for a new experience.
No longer do you schlep a mile to one kids’ store, another mile to a second one and, for those with the endurance, yet another mile to the third store. Here, one can find a bunch of children’s stores together, right by the ever-popular carousel.
According to mall management, the grouping of the stores happened by accident, but that doesn’t stop it from being a hit with shoppers, who don’t have to traverse the entire mall with children in tow to search out the toy stores.
And this isn’t just any group of stores.
This is the Disney store, from the folks who turned Mickey Mouse into one of history’s great merchandising tools. This is FAO Schwartz, whose New York store for decades has been a stop on the city’s annual Christmas tour, right up there with the huge Yuletide tree in Rockefeller Center. And this is Sesame Street, which opened its first store here two months ago and which has been on television for so many years that its viewers include children whose parents grew up on the show.
Today, the kid’s area is about to get its biggest test yet with the onset of the traditional start of the Christmas shopping season. There are other stores that sell children’s items near this corner of the mall, but from a child’s viewpoint, they dilute the experience with yucky stuff like clothes. This trio offers toys: stuffed animals, dolls, cartoon books, the sort of stuff kids love--and the sort of stuff that sells.
Where years ago there was a toy store or two and a hobby shop in town, today there are super-stores crammed to the rafters with toys and smaller specialty stores catering to youngsters and those who buy for them.
“People are . . . willing to spend more money for children because any kind of excess you’re involved with (in buying for children), there isn’t much guilt,” said Alladi Venkatesh, a UC Irvine marketing professor who specializes in the consumer culture. “I can buy 10 gifts for my daughter and . . . feel it’s for a better part of my life. Investing in children is investing in the future.”
Agreeing with him that parents are willing to spend big bucks on their kids was Gene Platin, president of the Sesame Street retail stores (a second one opened a month ago in the Glendale Galleria). In some cases, Platin said, “Parents want to give their children what they never had.” In other cases, “Parents want to give the kids what they had--and better.”
Venkatesh said that grouping children’s stores could signal a new willingness to exploit the children’s market “in a more systematic way.”
Grouping the stores tells shoppers that “yes, we have a particular location where you can shop for children” and emphasizes the importance of children’s goods as a separate consumer niche, the professor said.
While some malls “want the parent to browse through the whole million square feet, South Coast has said you don’t have to go to areas you don’t want to,” said Platin, adding that South Coast Plaza effectively says: “Come to the area where you’ll find something for your child.” He noted that “parents with strollers don’t want to browse the whole mall.”
Platin said he was happy to have his Sesame Street store near Disney and FAO Schwartz. “I think the parents love it,” he said. “I know the kids do. They run from store to store to store.”
It may have been a great idea, but it’s all an accident, swears the mall’s general manager, Jim Henwood.
“I wish I could tell you we were that brilliant” to group the stores, Henwood said, “but I’ve got to confess, we were not.”
When Disney approached South Coast Plaza four years ago about opening a store, Henwood said, it wound up with the only spot open at the time. When FAO Schwartz needed more space earlier this year, there happened to be a spot open right next to Disney. And when Sesame Street came in, “again, not by planning, a space happened to come available at the corner that just happened to be opposite Disney and FAO Schwartz and near the carousel.”
Henwood said he’s seeing more families with more children than in years gone by, and the latest group of parents “not only have the capacity” to buy lots of stuff for the kids, “they have a further refined taste level” that they indulge when they buy clothes and toys.
Shoppers Gerald and Joan Moch were less interested in the philosophy of shopping than the availability of goods on a recent foray through the mall.
Visiting from their home in the New York City suburb of Larchmont on a trip combining business and fun, the Mochs were hunting for gifts for their grandchildren. “We will probably go into Sesame Street,” Gerald Moch said, as his wife noticed items in the window display for their grandson.
Joan Moch said she thought the prices in Disney were high, and her husband thought FAO Schwartz was crowded. Still, though, “It was a great idea to have all the children’s things together,” Joan Moch said.
Henwood said he has no idea if grouping the high-profile children’s stores will spark a trend, but he noted that other shopping centers across the country keep close tabs on what’s going on with South Coast Plaza and try to mimic its successes.
UCI’s Venkatesh said if the idea of clustering stores aimed at one segment of the shopping population proves popular, the concept could spread. “I wouldn’t be surprised if four or five years from now there’s a segment for the elderly,” he said.
