An American Girl Doll catalog arrived in our mailbox yesterday. When I called to be removed from their mailing list, I found out our address had been purchased from another company but that the customer service representative could delete our address from all future mailings.

The rep was quite nice on the phone, and I swear I was not looking for trouble. After we had conducted our business, she continued: “Why don’t you give your catalog to a little girl in the neighborhood? Or donate it to your local library? They love to get our catalogs!”

Really? I was skeptical. A call to my local library confirmed this. “You’re right in thinking that’s odd, I don’t know what we’d do with a catalog,” a librarian at Minneapolis’ Central Library told me.

Another Minneapolis librarian told me that they’d probably donate it to a local shelter.

Our copy stayed in our house. While I worked in the kitchen, my seven-year-old read it to me, and I used it as an exercise to help her understand the value of money. For example, instead of paying $44 for the “homemade cookie” accessory pack, we can use what we already have in our own kitchen to make cookies — and figure out what else $44 could buy.

After that, she took her scissors to it and created stories surrounding the cut-out pictures of the the dolls and the dogs and the horses.

Seems an American Girl Doll sales catalog is good for something.

Related: The cutline from the photo accompanying Chris Riemenschneider’s Strib column today about the Mall of America was changed in the online version. The original reads:

Real American girls rest at the MOA’s American Girl store. With luck and a few made-up stories (such as the one about the doll that bit a girl), our author can steer his daughter away from the place.

Precious!

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Run, now, to True/Slant to read Stephen C. Webster’s The Most Offensive Commercial Ever Produced. A beautiful dissection of a current Levi’s commerial in which Walt Whitman and his words are bastardized, Webster exposes the profit-fueled hypocrisy that brings together a poor, abolitionist poet and a company known for numerous fair labor violations.

What would Whitman have written about such a uniquely American company [Levi Strauss]?

Would he have joyously celebrated an institution which left its equal daughters and equal sons to rot in the baking Texas sun?

Would the great poet have rejoiced in the servitude of those not fortunate enough to live on allegedly free soil?

Oh yes, perhaps he would have taken up for a company that stitches $5 of cloth together and resells it for nearly $100.

Or would he have beat his breast in bitter sadness and populist fury at what the “grand, sane, towering, seated Mother” America had wrought on her children?

Read and talk your (older) children through this one. True/Slant, where have you been all my life?

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Scholastic Corporation continues to hide behind their “book publisher” label and promoting Goosebumps-branded products for Halloween: The televison series will air on Cartoon Network five days a week; Goosebump ”premiums” will be featured at Taco Bell, bookmarks, treat bags and posters will be distributed via AAA to public schools,* and free Goosebump-branded activities will be offered at shopping malls on Saturdays.   

Television’s Cartoon Network? Fast-food restaurant Taco Bell? And shopping malls? I must not be the only one confused, as even the good folks at  Scholastic’s blog need to remind us:

. . . we can’t forget that Goosebumps is all about the THRILL of reading . . . .

Uh-huh.

*Note to Scholastic: Better check school policies. Minneapolis Public Schools prohibits selling to children — and teachers — in school.

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And finally, Target Australia is selling matching bras and underwear to toddlers: Frightening pressure is putting young girls in bras.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 18, 2009 at 1:22 pm and is filed under American corporate capitalism, Child Sexualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.