Stealth merchandising

Why is the venerable Scholastic book club company peddling cheesy toys in classrooms?

By Shoshana Marchand

Feb 29, 2000 | Imagine. Your kid walks into her third-grade classroom tomorrow and the teacher is selling toys. She's handing out brightly colored flyers, covered with pictures of the toys you should buy. She's handing them directly to your kids. These little flyers -- well, hey, let's just speak English and call them advertisements -- these little four-page advertisements are chock-full of cute pictures of Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, the Rugrats, Pokimon, CatDog, Crazy Bones and various other hot commercial properties. You would die to possess these key chains, these diaries, these stickers, these weird little sets of weird little bits of plastic -- if you were 8.

Tell your parents, says the teacher to the kids, tell them that if they'll just buy you a few of these items, our school can get some for free. And then the teacher sends you a wheedling little letter, begging you to buy something, anything, because the school needs your help and because -- here's the kicker -- it's all educational.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Scholastic book clubs.

And you thought they sold books.

Well, sure they do! Books like the "Official Pokimon Handbook: Collector's Deluxe Edition" or the "Official Crazy Bones Collectors Guide." How about "The Superstars Datebook 2000" ("Get Organized! With Your Favorite Superstars!") or the "Official Nickellenium Scrapbook" ("Capture the past, present and future in this cool fill-in book about life at the beginning of the second millennium! With fun photos of the Rugrats, Wild Thornberrys, CatDog, and more!")?

Photos of the Rugrats? But the Rugrats don't exist. This is like a photo of Snow White, or Bigfoot. How about the Valentine Stationery Kit ("Each heart-shaped sheet folds into a secret valentine")? Well, it's made of paper, so it's sort of like a book. Or the "Sega Dreamcast Official Preview Guide" ("Here's everything you need to know about this new 128-bit gaming system!")?

Now, I work hard to hide the mere existence of Radio Shack from my kids. I hide Radio Shack the way some people hide the existence of porn stores. I think there should be a 12-step program just for children who play with hand-held video games. The last thing I need is a teacher handing my kids ads for Sega Dreamcast.

And my kids don't get Nickelodeon. One year of premium cable fees equals a pretty great camping vacation or a plane ticket to see family in London or San Francisco. Plus, it's snowing outside and I'd rather go play in the snow, or go bake cookies, than watch "Rugrats."

But say you like Nickelodeon. Say you just love those adorable little Rugrats. Say you're just a less uptight parent than I. OK. There are still so many objections to in-school product shilling, it's hard to know where to begin.

How about we start with the one-third of the kids in my middle-class public school district who have never ordered anything -- ever -- from Scholastic book clubs. They're the same kids who get a free school lunch. What don't they have? Money. What don't they own? Pokimon lunchboxes, Britney Spears notebooks, Tarzan snow boots.

But everybody else does.

At least the kids without money don't have to be present to witness the actual moment of acquisition as their friends buy this stuff at the mall. But the booty that Scholastic sells gets handed out right in the classroom or, at best, stacked in cubbies and lockers by well-meaning parents. Then everyone checks out one another's stuff on the playground. So now the same kids who can't afford all the mall crap have to stare at the in-school crap, too.

But, you might say, surely it isn't all crap. And you're right. There is plenty of real literature mixed in. We bought the boxed set of "The Chronicles of Narnia" last year, and we've also bought some cheap editions of great novels by classy kids authors like Katherine Paterson, E.L. Konigsberg and Natalie Babbitt.

But you have to look pretty hard for the good stuff. And it can look pretty drab to kids when it is displayed next to merchandising trinkets. I hate to have to play disapproving mean Mommy: "Sorry, kids, it's Madeleine L'Engle or nothing." And as Dan Richardson, father of two boys in fourth and second grade, says, "It's pretty hard to refuse when they're hard into 'Star Wars' right now and then there's the next installment of the novelized Jedi kids books and more assorted 'Star Wars' trash."

Doesn't the word "scholastic" mean educational? How did we get here?

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