Monday PSA: How Are Your Shopping Manners?

April 14th, 2008

Filed under: Comics

How Are Your Shopping Manners? Click for the full page.This is a nicely dated PSA from 1960. While the message remains good, the examples — or at least the illustration of the examples — clearly show the era this PSA is from.

Click on the image to the right for the full ad.

While this ad was clearly written for kids, I think it reads as much as a warning about lax parenting; an alternate title would be “How Are Your Parenting Skills?” Mom shares a large part of the blame for every example of Jimmy’s misbehavior. He’s an eight year-old boy, he has the attention span of a gnat. He needs much more hands on parenting. She saw Jimmy “hot-rodding” with the shopping cart — why didn’t she stop him? Where was she when he was messing up the magazines or racing down the escalator. Her opening sentence shows the entire problem — she agrees to give Jimmy a reward despite his poor behavior. What’s he really learned in this day of shopping? He’s learned that Mom will still buy him a soda even when he’s a terror.

This PSA was written by Jack Schiff with art by Bernard Baily. It appeared in various October 1960 issue of DC comics, including Brave and Bold #32 (the source of this scan), Batman #135, Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #48, Wonder Woman #117, and — of course — Sugar & Spike #31.

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5 Responses to “ Monday PSA: How Are Your Shopping Manners? ”

  1. lilacsigil
    April 14th, 2008 at 11:59 pm

    “How Are Your Parenting Skills?”

    Very true! I work in a pharmacy, and sometimes kids play up. This is fine, but if you report to a parent that Little Jimmy is bellysliding on a glass shelf and trying to pull a sliding door off its tracks (true story from last week), the correct response is to restrain Jimmy, not to shout at me and tell me I’m not his mother. Well, no – you’re his mother, that’s why I’m telling you about his life-threatening behaviour!

  2. Carol Lanning
    September 14th, 2009 at 5:23 pm

    I completely agree, parents are becoming pretty lax on their kids. Now I understand that kids can really get on your nerves when they don’t listen, but it is important to stand firm and the more the repeat it, the more you stop it, eventually they will get the hint and start to listen. Believe me, I know this can be tough. Sometimes you just want to pull your hair out when your kids won’t listen, but stick with it, and you will eventually have a child who listens to your instructions.

    Caro

  3. Martin A.
    September 13th, 2011 at 3:29 am

    I think parents nowadays tend to spoil their kids! I remember when i was a kid that my parents were so strict on me and used to hate them however as I grew up, I understood what they were trying to do. They were molding me into a better surviving person.

  4. Jim Stein
    November 8th, 2011 at 8:32 pm

    I have kids and I can tell you we discipline them at home. This really limits the the tantrums in the store. Most parents don’t discipline at home and their kids our out of control out in public. Also it’s not fair to others to have their quality of life affected by children that are not being minded by their parents

    Jim

  5. Dean Kirkland
    December 27th, 2011 at 12:46 am

    Love these oldPSAs. When you past the dated styles there still seems to be a timeless message there.

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