Forecasting Follies

Quick, give us your prediction about holiday toy sales ... Sound familiar? Perhaps you've heard that question lately—once, or maybe a few thousand times. Pretty much every day since “the recalls” began (yes, like the Irish, I think we now have our own shorthanded term for the toy industry's brand of “troubles”), someone has asked me, and no doubt you—and probably anyone else with a connection to the toy business, no matter how fleeting or tenuous—that same question. It seems like not an hour goes by during which my computer doesn't chime at least once to announce that, yet again, I've received the latest in a non-stop string of Google Alerts highlighting stories in the mass media about the recalls and their supposed impact on consumer buying this holiday season.

Typically, the stories that Google has been so kind as to flag for me follow this pattern: crazy, grab your attention headlines (my favorite so far, from Inc.com, was “Killer Toys for Christmas,” which was actually a much more even-toned Q&A about one toy exec's thoughts on stricter government regulation of toy testing) followed by stories that pretty much say one of two things, either that it's going to be a bad holiday for toy sales (these tend to feature people who aren't actually directly involved with selling toys) or that it's really too soon to know what consumers are going to do (these tend to quote people in the business). But of all the alerts I get, my favorite are those that link to several stories in one e-mail that so glaringly highlight the grasping-at-straws nature of the media's efforts to declare the real impact of the recalls. A recent alert, for example, included a Reuters story with the headline “Most US Consumers Plan to Shun China-made Toys” and right below it a story by Medill Reports headlined “Foreign-made Toys Still Sell, Despite Recalls.” At that point, recall coverage entered the realm of the absurd.

It's really quite amazing the amount of effort the mass media are putting into pinning down what's going to happen this holiday season, especially considering the stories I'm referring to appeared in mid-October, a time when the children I know were still too wrapped up in their Halloween costume planning to have even thought about their holiday wishes. Neither, for that matter, were their parents. And of all of the stories I've read about the recalls, none of them factors in that it's kids themselves who most often decide which toys wind up under the Christmas tree. I seriously doubt they're going to be asking for toys specifically not made in China. More often than not, they'll be asking for whatever you're most actively marketing to them. And I'm glad I'm not the parent who plans on ignoring those requests.

Post recalls, I don't get as many “that's so cool” comments from people when they learn I write about toys. But that may be changing. Recently, I was at a restaurant where the tables are close together and private conversations often become group discussions. At the next table was a middle aged father and his young son, Joshua. Joshua is “nine and three-quarters” years old, and once we'd engaged him, he made sure we paid attention to him for the rest of meal. He had with him Bandai's Ben 10 Omnitrix Alien Viewer. His eyes lit up when he learned that I knew his toy was called an Omnitrix. We chatted about Ben 10 and it was soon pretty obvious that Joshua knew a lot more about its lore than I do. Chatting with him was fun, but what I was more interested in was Joshua's dad. That he didn't give me “the look” when I mentioned I worked for a toy magazine was a good sign. At no point did I get the impression that he was concerned that his son was playing with a plastic toy most likely made in China. And while one guy's lack of mentioning the recalls isn't a statistically significant sign that the toy business' darkest post-recall days are behind it, it's a start.