Julia, Genevieve, and I went to the big Cub Foods grocery store today to stock up on cereal and frozen vegetables - the consumption of which makes up a major part of the family diet. The girls rode in a "rocket cart," a regular shopping cart fitted with two seats and steering wheels for the kids, roughly half again as long as a regular cart, and about five times harder to steer and turn than a regular cart. So while I tried to avoid running down innocent bystanders, Julia and Genevieve amused themselves by grabbing each others' steering wheels (in a happy, "ain't we fun!" kinda way) and waving at other shoppers.
Julia also asked probably 100 questions about various items we saw, clearly trying to place the store's amazing variety of crap along her Food Comprehension Axis, which runs from "healthy" at the baby carrot end to "treaty" at the Keebler end. Far from being tiring, it got pretty entertaining to respond. She saw and asked about some things that didn't fit on the FCA at all: mascara, hair gel, cat food, a ginormous inflatable Winnie the Pooh Easter decoration. Others were easily classified: vegetables, chicken, bananas at the "healthy" end; Oreos, Cap'n Crunch, and brownies at the "treaty" end. The real fun came in processing other foodstuffs: olives in the bizarro gourmet-olive bar (healthy, but in small quantities), pretzels (ditto), chocolate-chip bagels (healthy at first glance, but actually fairly treaty), Oreo simulacra in the natural-foods aisle (still treaty, but marginally less so). She labeled the whole Easter-candy aisle as "extremely treaty," then assured me that if the Easter Bunny brings her a chocolate bunny that's too big, she'll break it in half and give part to Genevieve. Vivi agreed that this was a good idea.
As we wound through the store, I thought that an eavesdropping retailing researcher could have written a million PowerPoint slides about her questions. Basically, the bigger and more garish the display (like the ten-foot-tall cube of Oreos), the more questions she had about it. However, some of the marketing that is probably supposed to appeal to her actually did not: Cap'n Crunch, for instance, was not too enticing because, face it, the dude looks like a nutjob.