Baby store (婴儿用品店)

MJ and I went to a few baby stores to check out some baby items today, and it made me question the whole baby product business. I've learned this lesson before, from commercialization of higher education (college tuition, textbooks, etc.) to weddings (every wedding venue has a huge upcharge once they know you're doing a wedding and not just a regular party) to Christmas to Valentine's Day to pretty much everything that costs money in the U.S.: it's a pyramid scheme. Are these baby companies just capitalizing off parents' anxiety and worry about not being prepared for the baby when the big day arrives? I haven't gone through it yet and I may eat crow about it, but my guess is yes. Take "Carter's" child store for example: a strip mall store we went to that sells mostly children's clothing. Why does it sell mostly children's cloth, including children's toys, children's Halloween costumes, cute hats, shoes, all that? Probably because that's where the most margin is, and it's stuff you don't really need. Open secret about babies: They get bigger really quickly! So they can sell clothes from 0-3 months, 3-6 months, 6-12 months, etc. unlike adults where MJ has worn the same Nike shirt at home for all 9 years of our relationship. I'm pretty much the same, I wear my clothes until the lettering falls off, and wear socks until there are multiple holes everywhere. And for some reason every pair of shorts I have eventually pops a hole in the crotch. It's not me, I swear! I think my washing machine/ dryer has a disklike for all clothning and wears them down significantly faster. Anyway, I'm a minimalist and never wanted that many fancy clothing, and luckily MJ is not obsessed. But then there's all the other "must-have" items: crib, bassinett, stroller, car seat, baby bottles, baby bouncer, a nursing pillow, nursing chair, breast pump, etc. etc. These are just the basics, but there are literally thousands of types of just strollers. One store we went to had a $15 consultant fee just to let them show us their strollers, as if choosing one of a thousand strollers is a life-changing decision in the life of a baby synonomous with choosing their first car to drive with. The baby doesn't care! It's probably the only time the baby won't care, by the way, in teh first few years of life, then I imagine they will start getting picky about their food, their clothes, their toys, everything, but for now they don't care! I feel like I probably grew up in a bare minimum, change diapers, go to bed, sleep, wake up, eat, and then go back to bed. What happened to babies born in the wild like Tarzan or Mowgli raised by wolves with no modern amenities and no need for a crib or anything? They seemed to have turned out already, maybe even the better for it. What's with Target stacking up huge aisles of baby products just to make a profit off of us naive first-time parents? In a society where everything is for sale, even having babies is commercialized, maybe even more so because it's finally another way for a hardened, habitual shoppers who only go to Costco (MJ and I grabbed a pizza and hot dog at Costco today for $3.50, it was glorious) to add more to our budget and change our spending habits (for the better for the big companies, for the worse for us) and bleed the common man of some of our hard-earned money. They probably figure parents likely have money, or else they wouldn't have had a kid (parent planning) which is probably not true for all parents, but also, talk about opportunistic vultures. I feel like baby should just be another human being, we just need food, we need shelter (room to sleep in), a bed, poop, and wear clothes. That's how I live my life, why can't she be like me? The whole post-partum doula thing is even worse. There's a whole cottage industry of people thriving off of taking care of baby after the mom is compromised either by natural birth or by c-section and can't operate normally for a few weeks/months, wearing adult diaper and lying in bed while the baby is at its most vulnerable, the first days of life. So these post-partum nannies come in and help the families, which seems like a noble profession and a good job to have but it's because commercialized with various companies advertising their services at high rates and "pimping out" (no other way to say it) these doulas to come help the families, and the work week is 5-week days, so you pay for "5 weeks" but that's actually just 25 days of actual work, you need to pay 6 weeks for a month's work! Welcome to Parenthood! More complaints to come but I can see already why the financial burden for a baby is so high for families, and this is before the baby is even here!