To witness the entire range of parental emotions that occur when sending a kid off to college, look no further than a Target store in a college town. Or a Wal-Mart, or any other “big box” retailer that has caught on to a growing marketing opportunity; college-bound kids and their parents.
This past weekend my wife and I drove a pickup truck filled with shelves, a bike, books and other bulky stuff down to our youngest son’s college near San Diego. He’d driven his own car down a few days earlier to begin setting up his dorm for his junior year, but needed us to follow with the larger items that couldn’t be shoved, wedged, stacked, crammed, jammed or jimmied into his small sedan.
While there, we helped him empty out some even larger items from a storage unit he and several fellow students had rented together for the summer so they wouldn’t have to schlep things like refrigerators, microwave ovens, floor lamps and inkjet printers all the way back to their respective hometowns.
If you don’t have a kid in college, you may be surprised to learn that it isn’t unusual for today’s dorm room to be decked out like a nice studio apartment. An apartment with semi-gloss-painted cinder block walls, sure. But nice, nonetheless. I certainly don’t remember my digs at San Diego State to be anywhere near as well appointed as what students are used to today. Then again, I went to college in the last century. I’m not even sure they had invented the microwave oven yet. I doubt it.
I do remember that my college roommates and I didn’t have a stereo or TV in our room, much less a DVD player (not invented yet), game consoles (ditto) or all the other electronics and entertainment paraphernalia so ubiquitous in today’s college dorms. (Note to my kids: yes, we did have electric lighting and did not cook mastodon steaks over open fires. Puh-leez.)
And yet, even with multiple vehicles and a storage unit’s worth of student stuff, we found ourselves making a trip to the nearby Target store for fill-in items that we somehow had not acquired during his freshman and sophomore years. Hard to believe.
Now, Target is one of many contemporary retailers who’ve discovered that there’s gold in them thar dorm rooms. To wander the aisles during back-to-school week in any college town is to be an eyewitness to memorable moments in merchandising.
The store where we shopped had a giant section dedicated entirely to college students, including dorm-designed furniture, window treatments, bedding, small appliances, filing systems, throw rugs, hampers, bath caddies, electronics, extension cords, printer supplies, lighting, snacks … even a large selection of industrial strength air fresheners. I told you, these guys are smart.
Last Saturday, the college dorm section of the San Diego Target was packed with list-carrying families. As our son gathered his supplies, my wife and I were thoroughly entertained watching other moms, dads and siblings follow their college students like ducklings up one aisle and down another. One poor (or soon to be poor!) dad was obviously spent both emotionally and physically. He plopped himself down on a nearby display futon and just sat there, motionless and staring, as his college-bound daughter, wife and younger offspring took turns depositing various items into the hand basket on his lap.
While we watched, the dad’s face betrayed a range of emotions; from sadness, to melancholy to absolute zombie-like exhaustion. It reminded me of how I felt when our first-born went off to the land of higher education and even higher student loan balances.
Now that our fourth and last “child” is a junior, I wonder how time could possibly have screamed by so fast? Wandering the sales floor at Target last weekend, I also found myself wondering why today’s college kids live more comfortably than I do.
I’ll see you ‘round town.
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