Back-to-School Boost, Selling Out Nature, Etc.

The kids may or may not learn much, but their return to school will give the economy a lift. A study conducted by BIGresearch for the National Retail Federation predicts that families with school-age kids will spend an average of $483.28 on back-to-school items this fall, up 7.2 percent from last year. The biggest share will go for clothes ($219.46), followed by electronics/computer-related equipment ($101.03), shoes ($89.72) and school supplies ($73.06). In all, adults will shell out $14.79 billion on their kids' back-to-school gear. Moreover, teens and pre-teens will spend $884 million of their own money to equip themselves for the halls of learning. Seventy-six percent of consumers said they'll shop at discount stores for back-to-school items, with department stores (42 percent) and office-supply stores (35 percent) also attracting a sizeable clientele.Don't trash your CD player quite yet. While forecasting heady growth in digital music sales, a report by JupiterResearch says this channel won't replace CD sales in the near future. Digital music sales are forecast to reach $270 million this year and $1.7 billion in 2009. As for the related hardware, "U.S. shipments of MP3 players will grow over 50 percent in 2004 to well over 5 million, and will continue to grow almost 50 percent per year for the next several years." Despite having his head cropped off in the ad seen below, high schooler Jim Barnhill is the kid in his class "Most likely to marry a supermodel." Classmate Alicia Belton is the "Most likely to own her own business." Then there's Christine Dietsche, the unenviable star of this yearbook-parody ad on behalf of the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services. She's the student "Most likely to turn into one of those adults who stands in front of her office building in the cold smoking a cigarette at 10 in the morning with four ladies she doesn't know from Accounts Payable." The ad aims at impressing on kids in junior high and high school that they'll be stuck with smoking as adults if they dabble in it now. Considering that teens are horrified at the prospect of turning into a grownup of any sort, the ad is smart to link smoking to a particularly dreary kind of adulthood. More than attacks on Big Tobacco, this approach seems well calculated to de-glamorize smoking in the eyes of the target audience. BBDO of Minneapolis created the campaign.Watch out, you caribou. When asked in the abstract about trade-offs involving the environment and the economy, Americans at least give lip service to the environment. However, a new survey conducted for Money by International Communications Research indicates that high gasoline prices are taking a toll on consumers' green sentiment. Adults were asked whether gas prices at various levels would lead them to favor opening Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. A stoic 40 percent said there's no price that would make them feel such a step is worth taking. On the opposite end of the spectrum, 27 percent said pump prices are already high enough to justify drilling there. Ten percent would be in favor of drilling if gasoline cost $3 per gallon, 9 percent more would succumb at $5 per gallon and an additional 6 percent would drill away if the pump price were $10.If there were products designed just for ex-smokers—commemorative ashtrays, perhaps?—there'd be a booming market for them. A Mintel report says "nearly half of all Americans have been smokers at some point in their lives," though just 23 percent of adults are now smokers. That's in sync with Gallup research a couple years ago that showed the number of former smokers on a par with the number of current smokers. Mintel notes that the incidence of smoking is far above average among white males age 18-24 (33 percent) and black males age 45-64 (34 percent). In the secularized precincts of the big cities, it's easy to forget just how religious—and how Christianized—the country at large is. A nationwide survey of adults by Barna Research provides a reminder. On the topic of signs that list the Ten Commandments, just 18 percent said they favor their removal from public buildings. Even among atheists and agnostics, only a narrow majority (55 percent) said they'd back that policy. Thirteen percent of all respondents favored removing the phrase "In God We Trust" from U.S. currency; 15 percent backed dropping "one nation, under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance. Most notably, nearly one-third of all those polled (32 percent) said they'd favor a constitutional amendment "to establish Christianity as the official religion of the U.S." As you might expect, support for this idea was well above average among the evangelical Christians in the polling sample (66 percent supported it). But it was also backed by 21 percent of those who subscribe to non-Christian faiths. For reasons best known to themselves, 8 percent of atheists and agnostics declared themselves in favor of such an amendment.As a disease, it still wreaks havoc. But if AIDS/HIV were a brand, it would have to be classed among those whose place in the public consciousness hasn't lived up to early expectations. Several factors have shifted its trajectory. For one, successful therapies now mean an HIV-positive diagnosis is no longer (in the wealthy countries) an automatic death sentence. Meanwhile, terrorism has captured some of the share of mind that used to belong to disease in the fear-of-death category. In an Ipsos-Public Affairs poll, adults were asked how concerned they are personally about becoming infected with AIDS. Just 10 percent said they're "very concerned," with another 12 percent "somewhat" so. Most respondents said they're "not too concerned" (26 percent) or "not at all concerned" (52 percent). To the extent people worry about AIDS, they're more apt to be concerned about the younger generation: 27 percent said they're very concerned that a son or daughter might become infected; 24 percent said they're somewhat concerned. Still, these are hardly the sorts of numbers one would see if AIDS had fulfilled predictions that it would become the Black Death of our era. The figures in the chart below are particularly revealing in that regard: Two decades into the age of AIDS, a majority of American adults still have no personal acquaintance with any of its victims.

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Back-to-School Boost, Selling Out Nature, Etc.

Mark Dolliver

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