Move over, Silly Bandz; there’s a new inscrutable youth fad in town — it’s fancy crap designed especially for the inside of lockers. And parents of tweens can’t spend money on them quickly enough!
The New York Times reports that the company that makes the locker accessories was started by two mothers in the Dallas area. When locker accessories that they made for their own daughters garnered compliments from other parents, they decided to go into business for themselves. The company they founded, called Locker Lookz, now sells in-locker chandeliers that turn on when the door opens, shag carpets, mirrors, and magnetic wallpaper in more than 1,200 stores around the country. Target sells similar products with smaller price tags.
As you may have predicted, there isn’t enough supply to meet the ravenous demands of parents consuming vicariously through their children, and embarrassing in-store bickering has ensued.
Either way, they are being embraced from Little Rock, Ark., where an owner of an upscale children’s boutique, the Toggery, said the demand for locker chandeliers had led to “snatching and grabbing” in the store’s normally genteel aisles, to the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where shoppers at Lester’s who failed to pounce quickly enough found themselves picking over the dregs before the school year even started.
Proponents of Locker Lookz say it’s a fun way for little girls to express themselves through their lockers. Detractors say it’s just another way for rich kids to tell poor kids that being rich is awesome and being poor is for jerks. Little girls seem to go batty for them, although unfortunately, Locker Lookz cannot make boys like you or give you boobs, despite what hallway lore might suggest.
Still, parents are fighting over them, so that’s depressing.
This song and dance seems to be a little bit of history repeating. I believe Terrence Mann as played by James Earl Jones in Field of Dreams said it best when he said, of Locker Lookz,
People are dumb, Ray. They’ll come to upscale children’s toy stores for reasons they can’t even fathom. They’ll find themselves walking down the locker accessory aisle, not knowing for sure why they’re doing it. They’ll arrive at a display of unnecessary in-locker light fixtures, longing to shove each other. Of course, we won’t mind if you look around, you’ll say, it’s only $25 per locker chandelier. They’ll pass over the money without even thinking about it: for it is money that they have and peace they lack. And they’ll shove other parents out of the way, pull the Talbot’s cardigan sleeves of another perfect mother’s ensemble. And it’ll be like they dipped themselves in a pile of Tickle Me Elmos. Across the seasons and years, there’s one constant, and that’s parental shoving in order to buy dumb crap for their kids. America’s rolled by like an army of steamrollers; been erased like a white markerboard on the inside of a girl named Madison’s sixth grade locker, rebuilt, and erased again. But parental shoving marks the time. These bratty kids, this shoving game, is all a part of our Beanie Baby decorated past, Ray. It reminds us of Cabbage Patch kids and Gigapets and all that was meaninglessly fought over, and could be again. Oh, people are dumb, Ray. People are most definitely dumb.
Or maybe I’m just mad I didn’t think of this idea first.
Middle School Girls Unlock A Room Of Their Own, In Miniature [NYT]
Image via LockerLookz