Growing Customers: Sales-service work in the children`s culture industries

This article seeks to draw together insights from the sociologies of childhood and consumer culture as well as recent research on sales-service work to argue the case for a `paediocular' approach to the study of consumer culture and service work. Such an approach, it is argued here, would draw attention to the ways in which both the presence of children as consumers and dominant social constructions of childhood shape the configuration, management and experience of sales-service work. With reference to the findings of a series of interviews conducted with people in a range of sales-service environments, the analysis presented explores some of the ways in which sales-service providers working on the front line of the children's culture industries are required to socialize customers through the performance of aspirational and proprietary forms of aesthetic and emotional labour. The article also highlights some of the ways in which children's consumer culture involves the landscaping of sales-service environments and worker's bodies, as well as forms of interaction such as sales-service encounters, according to an aspirational and proprietary aesthetic that is designed to be simultaneously enchanting and instrumental.