The other morning freshening and straightening the front desk displays at Joie de Vivre, I saw something that gave me pause. For years, we've had a little container of "various tiny things" at the desk. It's been an odd little collection - tiny devil ducks, tiny ninjas, nuns, and brides and grooms, snakes, rubber chickens, Japanese creatures of indeterminate species, tiny frogs, cats, cows, etc. Maybe 5 years ago there was a big shake up in the toy world when a few companies were found to be importing things from China that might not be 100% safe for children. This led to industry wide testing and rather stringent new requirements that every single item that was to be sold as a toy go through a battery of expensive tests. Every item - so if you paid $2500 to have your tiny rubber frogs tested, and your tiny rubber snakes were made of identical material - you still had to pay $2500 to separately submit proof for the snakes. (My $2500 figure is arbitrary, but various companies have assured me it was in that range.) Needless to say - a lot of smaller companies dropped their tiniest items, rather than pay for the testing. This is why we no longer have tiny devil ducks and ninjas - a truly sad thing for us at Joie de Vivre. Anyway, our available "various tiny things" pool has drunk considerably and when I looked at it the other day I noticed something truly odd. Our collection now features rubber chickens (evidently popular enough to justify the expense), a group of very realistic tiny animals from a major toy company - and a bunch of black men. And there is a reason for that - of the various races of tiny brides and grooms we had -(white, brown, black) - the black men were always left behind. When they were scattered in with other races, it was fine, and I guess because I knew this I didn't really think about it. But that morning, I suddenly thought - what would a black man think if he came in and glanced down at this? It really does look kind of bizarre. I think I will be removing the little black men from our display ! !
I recently read an eye-opening article on okcupid's oktrends that might clarify why the little black men are left behind in your tiny things box:
ReplyDeletehttp://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-race-affects-whether-people-write-you-back/
I have never been to your store but I have heard about it, as well as the conundrum of the tiny black grooms being left behind, from a friend who knows I adore tiny things. So I had this epiphany that might sound sort of weird, but I'm going to post it anyway...throwing caution to the wind: instead of removing them from the shelf, what if you were to call the tiny be-suited men "tiny Obamas"? Methinks they would sell like proverbial hotcakes, especially as tokens of the recently successful re-election. :)
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