Readers — Here’s a marketing video designed to drive us crazy. How? It makes us worry about a problem that is exceedingly rare, easily avoided and yet dramatically re-enacted to a soundtrack that veers from heartbreakingly sad to effervescently hopeful JUST at the moment the product-as-hero shows up. The ad and the idea encapsulate the exact zeitgeist of our time: In the absence of cholera, polio, famine, dropsy, diphtheria, cholera, death by stoning and the Gestapo, we are urged to focus nonetheless on the fact our kids COULD DIE very easily TOMORROW unless we take serious precautions. Also, if we don’t, we will have to live our lives in slo-mo black and white. – L
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61 Comments
I agree that the video is over the top – my favorite part was the watermelon. However, anyone with a basic knowledge of physics knows that putting the infant bucket on the shopping cart like that is dangerous. It makes the cart top-heavy. Kids do get hurt. I can’t say whether or not it actually damages the latching mechanism, but you certainly don’t want to find out in an accident when it’s too late.
I cringe when I see parents using their car seats like that in stores. I understand not wanting to wake the baby up, but it’s SO MUCH EASIER and safer (not to mention lighter and less awkward) to carry the baby! If that’s not possible, the baby needs to be in the basket of the cart or in one of these devices.
“Thousands of kids fall every year from shopping carts” really? thousands? Are these thousands all in infant carriers? I find that very hard to believe as I’ve never met one person who’s had this happen to them. Though the watermelon illustration was a nice touch!
ROFL!
Is there an Oscar for Outstanding Achievement in Deranged Scaremongering? Cuz if there isn’t, they should make one just for that vid’s sound designer…
BTW, I find this blog increasingly addictive. My wife thinks I’m becoming a zealot.
Those things are likely to be carrying cholera, polio, famine, dropsy, diphtheria, cholera and possibly the Gestapo. Nasty.
That’s all well and good, but what if Favourite Store has, say, ten shopping carts with Safe-Dock, and they’re all in use when Parent-and-Child-Pair #11 shows up? Is Parent #11 supposed to:
A) Put Child, untethered, in the “cargo area” of the grocery cart?
B) Risk using the “dangerous,” pre-Safety-Dock method of simply placing the carrier on top of the cart, knowing that this could cause, injury, death, or more likely, a permanent “Bad Parent” label?
C) Go shopping another time when there’s alternate childcare available, and accept that, from now on, routine errands require scheduling a babysitter, just in case there are no Safe-Dock carts available upon arrival at Favourite Store?
D) Stop shopping altogether and simply buy everything online, for the same reason as Option C?
Of course, I’m being sarcastic. I’ve never heard of a child falling from an infant carrier that was placed on top of a grocery cart.
Also, on another note, it bugs me that some people think it’s okay to smash a perfectly good watermelon to make a point, when there are people in India, Africa, and right here in North America who don’t have enough to eat, and if someone had offered them the watermelon, they probably would have said yes. Heck, I’m not even starving (I’m eating fruit salad and drinking coffee right now), and if someone offered me a free watermelon, I would have said yes as well. It probably wasn’t even just THAT watermelon that got destroyed–it probably took at least a few takes to get that scene right, because, in Commercial Land, smashing fruit makes the world turn from black and white to colour, and that must be rather complicated to film, with the timing and everything. So, I think this commercial is an excellent commentary on contemporary life in a First World Nation, but it’s not exactly the message that was intended. Instead of seeing “Yay, Safety-Dock is awesome!!!”; I saw, “North America is a continent full of paranoid people who think nothing of wasting food.”
Well, duh, of course your child could get hurt falling from a cart. That’s why they should always wear helmets while shopping. You mean yours don’t? You obviously don’t love them! Don’t wait for the store clerk to call the police on you; do the right thing now!
And be sure to wear a helmet yourself as well. You’ll be better prepared for all those times you want to bang your head against the wall.
My favorite part is at :49. Pause the video there and you can see where the melon has been scored, so it can split perfectly in half upon impact.
P.S., When I was a kid, people just used the child seats that are already built into shopping carts. If memory serves, they didn’t always have seat belts either, which was just as well, because when they started putting the seat belts in, they were really thin, flimsy, and inadequate.
This is a real problem. While I agree that the video is over the top, yes, there are THOUSANDS of kids that are injured every year. If you didn’t know this was unsafe (since everyone sees people doing it all the time and I did it frequently with my first child before I knew better) this would actually give some useful information. I’m sorry, but I think your response to this ad is a little disheartening. As I stated: the ad is over the top; but there are parents who simply don’t know this sort of thing. I think education (not fear mongering education like this video) but education none the less is never a bad thing. Why not tell people there’s a safer way? I myself never knew those “docking” stations were what those were for. And watching this video actually taught me something.
And, really, you could use a baby carrier and wear your baby. Problem solved! No risk of injury, baby can still sleep, hands are free to shop! 😉
I have never known anyone who had this happen. Ever. What is the world coming to? I’m glad my kids are almost all grown up. Everyone is afraid of his shadow these days. My 21 year old son was having frozen yogurt with us this weekend for my birthday. He is a Junior in college. He said that his friends don’t work and have everything given to them and are afraid they can’t get out of bed for classes that start at NOON. He was telling us he felt a lot more prepared for life than his peers. I didn’t think we were that different but seeing things like this I realize the world has shifted far away from what I see as normal. No wonder people need Lenore to come sit with them and have tea while the children play in the front yard. This kind of thing makes me worried for our collective future.
@Mari – Nobody is questioning that the Law of Gravity still applies to babies on shopping trolleys. We’re objecting to the cloying, manipulative, guilt-based, fear-leveraging lunacy of an ad that lets a damn watermellon stand in for your child’s skull!
This is all fairly legit- it does damage the mechanism on the seat. It does cause a lot of injuries (usually compounded by the child not being strapped in properly). I mean, it’s not the biggest deal EVER, I am much more concerned with people properly restraining their children in the cars. But I still tell people that, if they can, put the child seat in the basket until the child is old enough to sit in the toddler seat. Also, these adapters usually provide better visibility, which makes life easier.
Anyway, these adapters are fairly common in Europe, and I really want to see them become more common in the US. It makes something that isn’t particularly safe into something that is about as safe as putting a child in the toddler seat. Unfortunately lots of children are injured in the toddler seat too, mostly due to not being bucked in and parents walking away from the cart.
I felt like I was watching Gallagher when the watermelon exploded. Way to blow accidents out of proportion! I thought they were going to go for the death-by-germs shopping cart angle but now falls.
Shopping carts are the new death
chambers.
Just to give a reality check on whether this is actually dangerous, or super-rare, this source stated:
When my kids were wee, I noticed other people placing their infant bucket in the cart like this and didn’t feel that it was a really great idea. Of course, if the child is strapped in, they could survive being ejected from a car on the highway. Still, since a shopping cart isn’t designed for this use, I was a little afraid of causing it to tip over.
The commercial is silly, but it’s not a bad idea for a product.
Oh my god! That watermelon falling and breaking was so tragic! I would definitely dive to save that watermelon, a baby, not so much so…
Um, most people I see shopping with babies either carry them in a wrap or they put the baby carrier INSIDE the cart. If you are dumb enough to try to balance your baby carrier on the seat part of the cart, you are too dumb to be reproducing.
This did happen to a friend of mine. Her grocery cart hit a bump in the parking lot and the baby seat rolled out and landed upside down (or side ways, I forget exactly). The baby was FINE, though, as she was nice and tightly strapped in. After I heard her story I put my babies in a carrier in the main part of the buggy and piled groceries around until they were big enough to sit in the actual seat of the grocery cart.
@Barak – “children” aren’t quite the same as “babies in car seats”. My instinct suggests that toddlers standing up in the seat are probably the most at risk. How many *babies* are actually injured this way?
CPSC info: http://tinyurl.com/l3otz7z . N.B. 49 percent were falls from the basket rather than the seat.
Always nice to have actual data rather than anecdotes.
Here’s another report
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/118/2/e540.full
which says that almost half the injuries are the result of carts tipping over, which the advertised product wouldn’t help.
Here’s a study on injuries in car seats when outside of vehicles:
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/126/2/352.long
Infant seats falling from shopping carts represented 8.1% of the estimated 8700 annual injuries, but presumably that includes the “tipping over” scenario mentioned above.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has a bunch of recommendations about shopping cart safety but didn’t actually mention car seats.
“Each year approximately 23000 children are treated in hospital emergency departments for injuries from shopping carts.”
Yes, but how many of them are infants in carseats? I worked in a grocery store during college (nearly full time the entire 4 years) and never once saw an infant in a carseat fall from a grocery cart. I did, however, weekly see older, mobile children fall off shopping carts while goofing around, pull shopping carts down on top of themselves, get run over by shopping carts and pinch little fingers in moving parts, some of which required ER visits. My own child once climbed on the back of one of those mini-carts before I could stop her and pulled the whole thing down onto herself while she fell head-first onto the cement floor.
I’m not saying that infants in carseats never fall out of carts. I am sure that it happens occasionally but Barak’s comment is exactly how all this fear-mongering starts. They take a bleak statistic and imply that the number represents that exact thing we are talking about rather than representing the whole of ALL shopping cart injuries, of which this is but one, very small portion.
I have never seen infant carrier placed on top of shopping cart like that. I have seen it only inside basket or on stroller wheels. How often does people do it? It does not seem much stable to me.
While the ad is a bit over the top, that product actually does sound like a good idea. The concerns they cite are, to my understanding, genuine. From what I’ve read, latching an infant seat onto a shopping cart seat can damage the latching mechanism, making the seat potentially less reliable during an actual car crash.
As for the comment about seat belts on shopping cart seats, while I’m well aware that those didn’t exist when I was a child, as a mom of an extremely squirmy toddler, I’m glad that they’re standard now. Even strapped in, my 15-month-old can wiggle his way into some precarious positions.
My kids have fallen from carts, but more from climbing all over them, never in a car seat. Besides if the infant is in a car seat they should be strapped in, and with the bar up I can’t see them hitting the floor like a scored watermelon and splitting apart.
Silly and over the top, besides which the “safety seat” looks far more dangerous and unstable than balancing a carrier on the seat anyway.
Though I did like the Thanks in the handlebar, prominently displayed, at the end there. Nice touch.
Oh, and based on my many years as a grocery store employee, I would NEVER, EVER use one of the advertised seats. While I am very far from a germaphobe, I will guarantee you that the store does NOT regularly (like ever) clean those things. Baby explosive diarrhea and pee leaks aside, people take whatever carts are most conveniently available and I’ve seen people throw dripping chickens and other meat products into those things regularly. My baby was always in her carseat in the back of the cart mostly to try to prevent the baggers from grabbing her feet and hands because the only thing in the world more disgusting than a grocery store bagger/cashier’s hands is probably money.
If the child is properly strapped into a car seat, attached to the top of the cart, and the cart tips that child is going to have a pretty decent level of projection from the EPS foam (helmet foam) on the seat, as well as just the seat breaking the fall.
Parents do put seats on like this, but there’s been a push for them not to (including making seats so they do NOT ‘latch in’). I still see it fairly often. By having an actual adapter you free up carts space by not putting the seat in the basket.
Again, it’s not like, the worst thing ever. And people who make it out to be annoy me. But these adapters being available are actually pretty awesome, when it comes to convenience and safety.
I used to put my daughter in the basket part only because her carrier would not fit in the top part. This video is way over the top and not realistic I don’t think.
Did anyone else notice that the watermelon was already cut? They’d pre-cut the “shell” of the watermelon to make a point. Although it’s absolutely tragic for a child to fall, even the distance of a shopping cart; i’m not sure pre-cutting a watermelon just to make an exaggerated point really shows the reality of the injury. Are these parents also going to keep their kids from riding bikes, playing football, or anything.
I’m with Donna on this one. I know a few families who’ve had shopping cart accidents, and for all of them, it was with older-than-babies kids who pulled the cart over. It’s almost always monkeying by preschoolers that does it. One family included an infant who was in the cart that was pulled over sideways by her older brother, not because of the infant seat slipping.
As others have said, I don’t mind the product itself. I do mind the fear-mongering.
they should have spliced in the village attack scene from Apocalypse Now, that would have been freakin’ awesome.
I mean c’mon, Soccer Mom Susie pushing little baby Kayden in his brand new $500 car seat attached to some rickety ass cart with a bum wheel and a squeak that would make the neighborhood dogs howl in agony while going through the household cleaner aisle…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz3Cc7wlfkI
If this is about babies falling from carriers placed on top of shopping carts, then what’s with the melon falling where the parent would stand? Why don’t they use a dummy to show how an infant can actually fall from said position – to actually show what they’re fearmongering about?
The only thing I see is the carrier tipping over to the side of the cart. Wouldn’t the child fall into the cart then?
(In that case, just buy something soft for the landing 😛 )
And why don’t parents just place the baby IN the cart?
And would shopping carts still fit into each other when they have this plastic thing on/in them?
@Emily: Like this? Though this is for older kids…
http://www.delcour.nl/wp-content/uploads/2012-05-26-Chloe-in-supermarktwagen2.jpg
@Nicole: “these adapters are fairly common in Europe” You do realize you’re talking about several dozens of different countries?
Oh no!!! You mean I put my babies in danger all those years ago! What a neglectful parent I was. I think I’ll go back and sue the stores I used to frequent when my kids were babies for putting them at such a deadly risk.
Notice how they mention the kids who fall from shopping carts, but fail to mention that most of those kids are unsecured and stand up on their own?
I wonder what percentage of kids who fall from carts are in carseats?
This made me think back on when I lived in Manhattan, I would shop at the Union Square market and routinely overloaded the back of the stroller leading to the whole thing tipping over backwards. Other shoppers would gasp but my infant son would be strapped in laughing while I rushed to save the berries and fruit.
I tried to get the heavy stuff (cider, potatoes,etc.) under him to help counter balance but I have to admit that there were times I had to use all my strength to keep the stroller up right as we walked home.
I know I know, awfully off topic, but I can’t resist:
This afternoon my mother and I went shopping in the city center. As we cycled back home afterwards, I saw a young mom cycling with her son next to her on his own bike. He looked about four years old and he was wearing a helmet.
Now, that’s an unusual sight around here, so I mentioned to my mother:
“Did you see that? That kid was wearing a helmet!”
I swear she wasn’t kidding when she said: “Maybe something’s wrong with him. Kids with epilepsy often wear helmets outside the house…”
I also want to know if that thousands thing is true???? It sounds made up. I know kids do fall. When it happens it is ugly. I witnessed it once. But you what? The kid that fell was a 3-year old who was standing in the basket part of the cart jumping up and down. His mother was not even close to the cart. She was talking to someone down the isle. She gave a couple of half hearted “stop that Johnny” comments. My mother said that kid is going to fall on his head. And then he did. It was horrible. IF there are thousands of kids falling, I want to know how many are babies in car seats and how many are older kids horse playing in the cart.
Also, I prefer a cart with a built in seat. It saves me having to haul the baby and the heavy car seat through the parking lot to the store, putting the cart seat in the basket, and getting another cart for the food. Then I have to haul two carts through the store and then back to the car.
Also Also…..the watermelon made me roll my eyes so hard I think I sprained them!
Wait a minute. My child is strapped into a device that’s designed to protect him if he’s flung through the windshield of a car going 70 mph. But if he falls from a height of 3.5 feet onto the ground while in said device, he could die?
ROTFLMAO.
That said, I never put a carseat on top like that. It does feel precarious. It makes the cart even more unwieldy. And I’m too short to see over it so I’d run into people if I tried.
I noticed that several commenters referenced the shopping cart as a “buggy”, indicating that they are not from the US (perhaps the UK or Australia?). I wonder if European carts are built differently, since when IKEA came to town, I realized that there was no way to securely anchor the baby carseat in the cart(and believe me; my kids were both over 9 lbs. at birth – I was not going to carry them around or break my back with a babysling while shopping). So there I did end up putting baby in the basket (and where do you then put your merchandise?!). My youngest is 7, but I NEVER felt that the shopping cart became unstable when the babyseat was hooked into the cart (again, those heavy babies maybe weighed it down?!). And of course numerous people have pointed out that the kids being hurt are the ambulatory ones. What a world we live in.
Can’t find anyone who said “buggy”. AFAIK a buggy is a stroller. A shopping cart is a TROLLEY in British English.
This video made me laugh– that watermelon bit– surely they can’t be serious?
we call them trolleys Betsy. I have never seen anyone use their carrier like that – people would put them in the basket of the trolley. Stores in my city don’t have this dock – but our trolleys have something that looks exactly like the dock but its a babyseat – you put your baby in it (after laying down a blanket or wrap if you don’t want the store germs 🙂 or people wear a baby wrap.
With increasing use of baby car carriers that slot into prams (strollers)and into the car I’m sure this will catch on here too eventually…
forgot to say I’m in Australia 🙂
Brian – I have totally done the overloaded-stroller-tipping-backwards thing! And my stroller even has a warning label about said situation. Nonetheless, I am more likely to give an onlooker a heart attack than actually hurt my kid. Who laughs like crazy when it happens 🙂
Re: “Each year approximately 23000 children are treated in hospital emergency departments for injuries from shopping carts.”
When I see that quote, the first thing I think of are all the people who run to the doctor or emergency room for almost nothing. Just because 23000 children “were treated” doesn’t mean they needed to be.
The number I’d like to know is the one that tells me how many of those kids would have been just fine if their parents hadn’t done the knee-jerk trip to the emergency room.
How many almost didn’t go, and then thought: “Oh well, I suppose I’d better take little Alex just in case … Better safe then sorry. And besides INSURANCE WITH PAY FOR IT!”
It would be interesting for commenters to weigh in on falls their children have experienced with no serious consequences and no doctors involved.
I so lol’d at the watermelon bit! And my 1 1/2 year old started dancing when the cheerful music came on – advertising sure works on her!
It seems like some parody student film. It’s so rubbish that I normally wouldn’t give a crap, but some people are so desensitised to nonsense that I’m sure they’d take it seriously. I could see this showing up in my facebook newsfeed alongside aged and inaccurate warnings about fb security settings and pro-Chik-Fil-A (‘but I’m not a homophobe, I just live chicken sandwiches!’) diatribes.
People say “buggy” in some parts of the U.S.
And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen preschool/early school aged children hanging off the back end of the cart with their feet on the lower rack — often with their parents’ clear approval. How many of the thousands are kids falling off and getting run over or run into by another cart or otherwise hurt THAT way?
Are they saying my baby could be injured if I dropped a watermelon on him from a height of 3 feet? Now there’s a danger I hadn’t previously considered.
@Betsy: This is a normal shopping cart (‘winkelwagentje’) as we know them in the Netherlands…
http://www.delcour.nl/wp-content/uploads/2012-05-26-Chloe-in-supermarktwagen2.jpg
Not that many people bring babies in carseats into the supermarket here…
AAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!! I guess its only redeeming quality is it is such a textbook example of using emotional appeals through images, music, text, and editing in order to sell a product, that if I were still teaching my 9th grade class on applied critical thinking I would save a copy.
Mixed feelings here: I do not put infant bucket seats on top of shopping carts because they are indeed not meant for each other and I think it’s an unsafe practice. I other carry my daughter in the baby k’tan or stick the bucket seat in the shopping basket itself. But this is bad scaremongering marketing!
I had a cart tip over. My youngest, about 9 months, in the seat, strapped in, and my second and oldest decided that they should both hang on the same side from the outside. They were about 3 and 6. No one was hurt. Just scared. They all came through just fine and the other patrons were more worried than I was.
Thanks to those who have responded to this post and joined the discussion about shopping cart safety. Admittedly, our informational video is a little over the top; but we are a small company, with only one voice trying to bring attention to serious problem.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission estimates that some 16,000 children under the age of 5 fall out of shopping carts each year. Infant carriers falling from the cart have accounted for as much as 5% of these falls. In fact, out 4,548 reports made to the Commission, 280 involved infant carriers. This happens more often than people are aware.
Our goal is to raise awareness about a problem with a very simple solution – one that doesn’t cost parents anything and even makes shopping more convenient by making room in the cart basket without having to carry the infant. It’s easy to find stores that have these specially-fitted, safety-tested carts by entering a city or zip code at shoppingcartsafety.com. We hope all parents will keep this information in mind the next time they shop.
-The Safestrap Team
I’m not a fearmonger-er by any means, and I love this blog.
But.
Carseats are for cars. They are not for carrying babies around. Yes, every time you uninstall (unclick) your carseat from the car and re-install it on something it wasn’t meant to attach to, you’re damaging the safety mechanisms that help keep kids safe in cars.
I carried my kid in an Ergo….actually, I still do sometimes, and she’s 2.5 years old. I never bought an infant bucket seat. I used a convertible carseat good for 5lbs and up, and made sure to securely install it in the car. And there it stayed.
Infant bucket seats are actually rather anti-Free Range.
The video was over the top, for sure. But carseats do not belong on top of shopping carts.
Hmmm….I have yet to see a built in baby carrier at the store that actually has *working* straps. They are always broken, twisted or missing.
I love this blog and the messages it sends out but not on this topic. This actually does happen more often than you think. Car seats are for IN THE CAR. Carry your baby in a wrap or put baby in a stroller.
Actually, although not for safety reasons, I have to say I kind of want one of these, although one I can take to and from the store for my personal use. You could fit so much more groceries into this than those storage areas you get underneath a stroller. If they stopped marketing it as a safety thing as an in store product and started marketing this as a take home product with a cool design and maybe something that made it not look like a typical shopping cart for the urban eco-boomer moms so we could walk from our homes and to the stores and have lots of space for stuff I think they would get a lot of sales.
I do love how several insist “this happens more than you think” (without knowing how often we think it happens) or something similar and yet not a single person has provided any statistics for exactly how often it does happen. We have several statistics of how often kids injure themselves on shopping carts but child doesn’t equal infant in carseat that is injured when the carseat falls off the cart due to a lack of proper attachment.
I thought car seats protected babies. If the seat falls, wouldn’t it be rather unlikely that the baby’s head would be the part that hits the floor?
This is sooo not necessary!
Guess I was a bad mommy, as when my daughter was an infant, and on the few trips she took to the supermarket in her carrier, I had placed the carrier in such a precarious position, but with no incident.
I have issue, however, with older kids who hang onto the OUTSIDE of the carts. Can’t tell you how many times I see this and cringe inwardly, thinking that’s more of a hazard, but people keep doing it anyway. Just out of curiosity, are there injury stats for that (the possibility of a kid falling off, or having the cart topple onto them), or is the risk greater when they’re INSIDE the cart (another pet peeve of mine).
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