Wal Mart's Christmas Gift List

From AdAge...
Wal-Mart's launch of a new kind of "wish list" Christmas site for children has drawn the ire of consumer advocates. "If you show us what you want on your list, we'll blast it off to your parents," says an animated holiday elf named Wally who guides children through a seemingly endless conveyor belt of toys on the retailer's website. Children who click a "yes" button to have a product e-mailed to their parents hear a round of applause. If they click the "no" button, the rejected toy gets boxed up and unceremoniously sent to a dump truck.

The animated Wally, and his elf friend Mary, characters with quirky accents and irreverent attitudes, are also the stars of an upcoming 60-second, 3-D spot that will run in cinemas this holiday season, and they will also appear in TV spots and in a special comic book that will be sent to children who visit the website of the nation's largest toy retailer.

Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood is launching a letter-writing campaign among its 7,000 members asking Wal-Mart to close down the site. "Families have a hard enough time navigating holiday commercialism without the world's largest retailer bypassing parents entirely and urging children to nag," said Susan Linn, co-founder. "For a company that purports to be family-friendly and promote family values it's very disrespectful of both parents and children." What do you think?

So, did Wal-Mart overstep its bounds with a holiday website that allows children to build a toy wish list that the retailer e-mails to their parents? What do you think?

Garret Ohm