Bye Bye, Buy Buy Baby

Lately it seems like every other post I write is baby-related, but I suppose that comes with the eight-months-and-three-weeks-pregnant territory. I've been spending most of my free time preparing for the baby, shopping for her, and taking classes over at the hospital, not to mention trying frantically to thin my dress hoard. And since this blog is where I talk about all the things on my mind, I suppose it makes sense that right now it's riding the 7:30 express train to Babysville.

Well, that and most of my dresses no longer fit.

In any case, even though I've slowed down on my dress shopping, I've still been burning the midnight oil (well, plastic) accumulating all the stuff it turns out you need for a baby. My mom came to visit and help me set up for the baby over Labor Day weekend, and let me tell you, I haven't spent that much time in Target since I moved to LA and needed to furnish an entire apartment from the ground up!

In the past three weeks, I've assembled a bassinet (with help from Mom!), purged a few pairs of shoes, and tidied up the baby's room. I've also picked up a zillion things: a changing pad, baby towels, washcloths, the world's softest blanket, 10 pairs of baby socks, the world's most adorable snowsuit, a Halloween outfit, a fleece dinosaur outfit, crib sheets and mattress pads, a car seat, a baby bathtub, the electric nail file thing I got for my godchildren, and finally, a crib and a dresser (both still in their boxes, awaiting my dad because I'm wayyyyyy too pregnant to assemble it.)

Ta-da!

Post-bassinet-assembly Starbucks of Triumph, feat. Mom

Did you notice what's not on that list? Yep, that's right: we have yet to buy a stroller. This is not for lack of trying, either. My mom and I went to look at four different stores and I left every store just a little more frustrated than the last.

What's the problem, you ask? Well, for those of you who haven't had the joy of shopping for baby gear, let me enlighten you. My quest for a nice lightweight stroller that'll last from infancy to toddlerhood has been marred by two things:

1) the hegemonic ascendance of the travel system, and
2) emotionally manipulative sales techniques.

If you saw my recent rant post about travel systems, you already know that I'm not buying one. This has made stroller shopping exponentially more difficult, since it seems like 90% of the ones I've seen in the stores have been travel systems. (Also, at the first Target we tried, the strollers were tethered to a high shelf, so it was impossible to try them out. But that's neither here nor there.)

So after striking out in Target's stroller aisle, my mom and I ventured up to Buy Buy Baby, which involved a) braving Chicago traffic to go to a neighborhood I'd never been to, and b) a truly impressive parallel parking job on my part, thankyouverymuch. Both of us figured that a store that's entirely about baby stuff would have a better selection and more knowledgeable staff to help us out.

We got to the stroller department, which immediately overwhelmed me because 1) there were so freaking many different kinds! and 2) they're not all intuitive to fold up. (Bear in mind that I'd been out and about for hours at this point, and my belly was aching all around my bump.) So we found a sales associate and asked for help.

What followed went something like this. Note: italicized text represents my internal monologue.

Emily: *clutching bottom of belly* "Hi! I'm looking for a lightweight stroller that'll work from birth through toddlerhood, and I absolutely don't want a travel system. Can you please show me what you have like that?"
Sales Associate: "you know, a lot of people say they don't want a travel system, but then come in six months later to buy one because they've changed their mind."
Emily: well maybe, but I don't want one; why would I come back and buy one once the baby's gotten bigger, heavier, and able to hold up her neck on her own? "I'm just interested in a non-travel system stroller that works for newborns as well as toddlers."
SA: "alright, well we have this one. It's the floor model but it also comes in other colors."
Emily/Mom: *looks at stroller, lifts it up, asks how it folds and reclines*
SA: *while showing us how to recline the seat* "We have another one by the same brand that's much better because it has better wheels and a removable bassinet and --"
Mom: "What's wrong with these wheels?"
Emily: where the hell am I supposed to stash a stroller bassinet in my apartment once she's old enough to ride in the normal part?
SA: "Those wheels are not as big as on this one" *lifts stroller that costs $250 more off the shelf*
Mom: *lines strollers up side by side, wheels them around, glances at the expression on my face, which is a combination of annoyance that he's trying to upsell up and pain because my belly is massive and I've been on my feel all day* "There's like a 5% difference in size here and it doesn't seem to make much difference"
Emily: *grimacing* "Yeah. So do you have others like the first stroller?"
SA: *sees it's time to switch tactics* "What a lot of people prefer about this [more expensive] stroller is that you can have the baby facing you as well as facing out. People like to have the baby facing them so you can keep an eye on them and share stories with them..."
Emily: share stories with your baby? What hack marketing guide did that phrase come from?
SA: "...So when you take the baby to the store and you're showing them 'that's a green apple, that's a red tomato, that's a yellow pepper,' you can actually show them and know that they see what you're looking at."
Emily: this is the clumsiest appeal in human history to a new mom's fear of not giving her child the enrichment she needs to eventually get into college. And my belly hurts so much. "Ok. So do you have other ones like the first stroller that we could see?"
SA: "Yeah, we have a lot like that" *makes no move to show us any other strollers that fit what I'm asking for*
Emily/Mom: *exchanging A Look*
Emily: "Great, thank you for your time."

Maybe it's the pregnancy hormones or something, but this interaction really, really irked me. I felt like I'd driven all that way to the store and stood around for absolutely nothing. I felt vaguely insulted that I was being treated like I wasn't capable of deciding what kind of stroller I wanted to buy. I felt more insulted by the fact that this store apparently thinks new moms are stupid and gullible enough to fall for these sales tactics, and trained their sales staff accordingly. I felt frustrated because I really, really wanted to cross the stroller off of my to-buy list.

So we left, and I'll be picking up a stroller on Amazon.

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