Will Tesco let Toys be toys?

Now, you may not have noticed, but there’s been a backlash against all things pink – not the colour per se, but the fact it is getting to be nigh-on impossible to buy toys, clothing, or just about anything for children without being steered towards the kind of gender-colour stereotyping that would make Barbie proud.

Where once you had Lego bricks and the freedom of your imagination, now even construction toys are gender specific. Earlier this week, for example, LiteBrix brought out a range of construction toys with flashing lights – for boys, a space trooper robot; for girls, a fashion runway.

Now, I'm sure that many kids, girls and boys, would be very happy playing with the choices presented to them. What I object to is that it has got to the stage where virtually everything – from teethers and toddler bath toys upwards – are sign-posted pink for girls or baby blue for boys – and never the twain shall meet.

So it will come as a relief to some that Tesco has announced it is going to be removing all reference to gender on its online toys pages.

A Tesco spokesperson told The Grocer: “To help customers easily search through the range of toys that we offer, we categorise our toys in a number of ways including by price, age range and gender.

“We’ve recently carried out a review to understand what customers find useful, and as a result we’ll no longer be categorising toys by gender as we’ve found customers are not using this as a way to search.”

Parent lobby group Let Toys Be Toys, which successfully complained to Tesco in May that a chemistry set was being marketed as a boy’s toy – effectively stifling potential Baroness Greenfields or Marie Curies from the very start – said it was “really pleased to see that Tesco are moving in the right direction on an issue that is becoming increasingly important to customers”.

“However, we're just as concerned with in-store signs – if not more so, as they're more visible to children,” it added.

Tesco admitted the change was likely to take some time to complete and made no mention of its policy in-store. However, given that there is a (pink) kitchen aimed at small children advertised with the words “after she has finished cooking, she can wash up the pots in the sink”, any move seems to me to be decades late. (Although to be fair, this seems to be the manufacturer’s description, not just the retailer’s.)

This does bring me to a chicken/egg conundrum – do manufacturers and retailers go pink because kids demand it, or do kids like it because it is what is marketed at them?

As a child growing up in the 1980s, who alternated between spending time hanging upside down on a rope strung across the garden, climbing trees, and playing with cars with my sister, to spending hours badly sewing clothes for my favourite doll and covering myself and everything around me in glitter, I have to admit, I find it a shame that kids have to be channelled down a well-worn path rather than being allowed to forge their own.

But at least when it comes to exploring, Dora’s already out there.


This article was first published in The Grocer's Daily Bread newsletter