Sign of the times

Visited an Archies store recently ( it's a chain of stores in India that retails greeting cards , gift items ) . Having taken to making personalized cards and letters I had not visited any such store in months . The range of cards was ok . The gifts items give the impression that the store seeks to cater only to teenage girls who want to buy gifts for other teenagers . It would take a courageous father to display any gift from that store in his office . Tough luck if you are out shopping there for any person who is not a teenager . Archies is certainly missing a huge opportunity to cater to a wider segment of the population . 

As I walked through the store I saw something I'd never seen before . There were ceramic piggy banks (nothing piggy about them though) . The color scheme was very feminine . And the piggy banks had slogans like "shoe fund" , "hand bag fund" . There was one piggy bank that had some message from a parent to the daughter encouraging her to save for her dreams (or something to that effect). Apparently boys don't save money or at least they don't save money this way . 

This kind of merchandise is telling of our times and it's rampant consumerism. A retailer is marketing piggy banks encouraging girls to save money to be able to buy hand bags and shoes . Interestingly the piggy banks were the variety where the only way to access the money is to break it ( as the tag read " we encourage you to wrap a cloth around it before breaking to avoid any damage to the user" ) . So each time the consumer breaks a piggy bank she'll need another one . Maybe the idea is to launch a mini piggy to gather funds to buy accessory specific piggy banks .