It's taking advantage of children and their connection with their funders (parents).
This is similar. My kids don't play video games, but I have friends who will hear no end of whining and crying when their kid needs more Minecraft $$$. Of course they can refuse to participate, but as a parent it's frustrating.
You could establish some reward (choosing a movie to watch, game to play, a sweet snack, etc). You could then teach a lesson in temperance or read an appropriate child's book. After, you can test the lesson by bringing your child to the store. If he behaves well, then you've succeeded. If not, you remove the previously established reward for a day or two, and then try a different teaching method.
On the other hand, to those of us not 24/7 paragons, the goddamn store being deliberately set up to stimulate three year olds to beg for sugar is a pain in the ass.
Your examples are way harder. Never raise your voice in anger? That's unachievable and absurd for most people. Take ten minutes per week to work with a child to improve unacceptable behavior? It sucks but is pretty realistic.
Sometimes you have no choice but to drag an already tired kid into the store, in a hurry, with seven things on your mind and after a long day, and the teachable moment may be out of reach. And then the kid-eye-level candy bars are very annoying.
You write "It's pretty obvious to any parent but very hard to do 100% of the time" but I don't think my method requires that. It could be more like - "I have some free time today, I'll take my kid to the store to help teach him self-control". That is, you can still be upset with store designers that they arranged their items to cause your kids to frustrate you, and you can still usually leave your kid at home while you go to the store, but you can also sometimes take advantage of the environment that the store has created for you.
Similarly, I was listening to a podcast recently about the moral virtue of becoming a vegetarian due to the various evils caused by factory farming. It's one thing that I've always struggled with, because while I see the moral case, I really like the taste of meat. One point that was made on this podcast was: Eating 10% less meat is about 10% as good as being a vegetarian. And, if you can't force yourself to become a vegetarian, it is better to be 10% of a vegetarian than 0%. Likewise, applying rigorous parenting techniques may be too challenging to do consistently, but applying them 10% of the time may be 10% as good - but better than nothing!
Of course, reality is more like your most recent paragraph, where we do what we can and every little counts. We don't disagree.
After a few times of that, the kid will come to the conclusion that (s)he won't get it and just forget it. It's the same way you train your body in response to certain desires.
In the supermarket I need to bit my tongue when I see a parent doing it all wrong. They are terrified when their children start to throw a tantrum. And of course the children smell the fear and do it every time.
I offer a complicity nod when I see a smarter mother acting as if it's nothing and smiling even when the child is rolling on the floor crying.
Even without a reward or punishment, simple repeated resistance to the behavior makes a difference. Starting early is easier; a five-year-old is more set in his ways than a 2 or 3-year-old, but there is still plenty of opportunity before friendships take priority over parental influence (around 11 years old).
If these opportunities aren't taken, then the child will grow up with less impulse control and delayed gratification than he would have had otherwise.
I'm not saying he'll be a bad kid, I'm saying it's a lost opportunity, e.g. the difference between being able to concentrate on studies for 30 minutes versus 60 minutes; deciding one doughnut is enough instead of going for the second one; being able to walk away from a confrontation with a loved one instead of attacking with the perfect sarcastic barb.
Also, this technique is going to work very much better with some children than others.
I hate to be in the position of advocating in favor of a reality TV show, but "Super Nanny" was transformational -- it's got a handful of simple, effective suggestions for parenting.
I'm a parent, so I don't say this lightly. It's not the store. It's you. Get used to the fact that your kid will see stuff everywhere they aren't supposed to have. Not taking your kid into situations like this will pay terrible dividends in future years. Deal with this now.
Kids need to learn they don't get everything they want. I needed to leave behind a shopping cart more than once to carry my child out of the store. But he learned, and is now a beacon of delayed gratification.
So many times this. We thought maybe our kids really were abberant. But then we met other parents with this secret knowledge as our son aged and we had a daughter.
I accept my children's disappointment. May they learn it young. I am here to guide them to the most productive life possible. Productive in the fulfillment sense, not the material sense. This will always require weathering the storm of their sometimes outbursting disappointment. Funny thing, though, after a while they learn that no actually means no and they don't lose their cool so much over it these days.
Edit: just want to say it actually is hard. It requires a lot of the parents to be consistent and show up regularly. It is so hard in fact that it is a sort of secret. But within the confines of this sacrifice and constraint there is a sort of calm and freedom that makes day to day life flow better. It isn't for everyone, but modifying a young child's behavior in most cases is anything but mysterious.
I am not looking forward to waking up at 5:45am instead!
The specific time does not matter so much as the routine and consistency. The trickiest thing to work around is the Sun. My kids tend to do best when the Sun is mostly set. Some of the time they do pop up earlier. But like all things it changes. At my kids age my role in the morning is quite different from what it used to be :)
Easy to forget the planet isn't the same for everyone else :)
If the kid would be autistic I would do it, but otherwise nope.
It turns out that you will always have a routine whether you are aware of it or not.
Everyone enjoys the rush of freedom that comes from breaking the rules. Remember they are only rules, not laws. Rules and routine aren't simply restrictive, they can give a backdrop to all the other moments.
Their delight when you do something special like going out for dinner or a "late" night walk is wonderful. Can be as often as 1-2x a week or even more during school holidays.
Yes, I'm salty that I never was allowed to have a console or watch most popular TV shows because they're too banal/grapic/sexualized/adult. It sucks only being able to experience those things at friends' houses, because you'll be terrible at it if it's games and not know the lore if it's shows, so you still can't really share the experience. It sucks to be an outsider as a kid and I wish my parents had not made me that. Its one of the few things I really regret.
kid wants a lolly from the checkout? subtract from the allowance, and make sure the kid knows the remaining. don't restrict what the allowance can be used for, but strictly police the amount per month.
they have to learn from early on, this useful skill of trade off and long term planning. it's never too late to start.
My parents gave me an allowance, then carefully audited every purchase and refused to let me spend it on things they didn't think were good value. Which is 1) a waste of their time 2) frustrating for the kid and 3) utterly defeats the purpose, because I never got to learn restraint or budgeting, and it bit me on the ass when I was in my early 20s.
The earlier your kids learn about delayed gratification, not always getting what they want, not throwing tantrums, and not paying too much attention to advertising, the better.
You're just saving up bigger problems.
Edit: My parents went through a hippy phase when I and my brother were growing up; we went vegetarian, and we were not allowed refined sugar, caffeine, etc. What treats we did get were all organic, wholewheat, honey sweetened, carob flavored, etc. Quite horrible, honestly.
And while the rules were silly and arbitrary, they were enforced consistently. As a result, neither I or my brother ever threw a tantrum about wanting candy, because we knew it wouldn't do any good. It didn't even occur to us to try; it would be like throwing a tantrum because we wanted to fly.
If your kids sometimes get candy, want more candy, and know they can throw a tantrum and get the candy, they will. They're 5, of course they will. There's a lesson to be taken from that, and it's not "pretend candy doesn't exist half the time".
That's the entire point; it's a psychological hack. It's the same idea as gambling chips at a casino. If they force you to purchase "coins" in bulk, then you are much more likely to spend them freely once you have them than you would with actual cash, as the value is too abstract. They will also set the prices in such a way that you just need to buy one more "coin pack" even though you only need a few individual coins to get what you want.
Slot machines, which don't have those considerations, can be played with your choice of cash or cards that can have value loaded onto them, as of the last time I checked.
You have the added pain of turning chips back into dollars, so your mind starts to play tricks on you making parting with the chips ever so easier than parting with cash. You discount for the hassle of getting back to cash.
In addition you get chips from any and every dealer in the casino. You get cash from one of a couple cashiers placed very inconveniently around the periphery where there are often lines or uncertainty about which windows are open. Just a touch of uncertainty.
Virtual game currencies are, amazingly, even worse. It is incredibly painful and difficult to walk away from them since you lose all that fake "value" you've built up or bought.
First thing I do is do the math on what each individual item I'm interested in costs in dollars based on the price of both the most and least expensive coin pack or whatever.
Me too, but I guarantee we're outliers. You probably look at your credit card statements sometimes too :)
They could easily choose to make the exchange rate easy (at least in e.g. USD), or even better, forego the fake currency system entirely and allow transactions in the user's local currency. Instead they erect multiple layers of obfuscation to keep you from thinking about the idea that you're actually spending real money. Something tells me they spend the resources on this system because it results in increased net profits.
When I buy a pack of tokens rather than depositing USD or similar into an account, I'm more likely to spend all of those tokens. I'm also not likely to say "hey, I demand you give me my remaining balance back" after buying a single cheap item. It also makes giving rewards easy and makes sure that money will be spent in the same place.
Some free to play games, World of Tanks for example have larger things that are sold both in gold and in USD - because they make it possible for people to earn gold in game through multiplayer competitions but want it to be easy for someone who just wants premium time to buy it with cash.
In my experience, it's exactly the opposite, since packs of points/tokens are not typically divisible by the price of common purchases. For example, you might have the option to buy 500, 1500, or 3000 points; items then cost something like 740 or 800 or 1600 points. To spend your last point/token you almost certainly have to buy more than you originally intended.
They're perhaps not the reason you bought the premium currency, but they're worth enough that you'll spend them.
Couldn't that be said about any business that sell products aimed at children?