If you celebrate Christmas, have you finished your Christmas shopping?

Consumer Reports published some highly entertaining survey results today about holiday shopping. An excerpt (which I believe to be a breakdown restricted to the 20% who stated they have not started their holiday shopping yet, although CR could have been much clearer about this):

Thirty-nine percent report buying gifts in drug stores, 9 percent shopped with street vendors, and a small sliver (one percent) admitted buying holiday gifts from vending machines. Forty-three percent plan to take the easy path and buy a gift card.

What if you really don't manage to get all of those gifts purchased in time? Of those who said they expected to be in that position, 46 percent said they'd give their intended recipient an IOU; 36 percent said they'd just pretend it didn't happen. Eight percent said they'd just avoid the other person.

In the interest of fewer awkward moments, here's a quick list of ideas for last-minute gifts, and things you should avoid. Keep in mind that Amazon.com is offering free two-day shipping until 7 p.m. PT / 10 p.m. ET today (Wednesday), which equals a Christmas Eve delivery.

Great last-minute gifts

• Amazon.com gift cards. It's hard to find someone who can't find something they would like on Amazon. Amazon is offering free one-day shipping on all gift cards, so you don't even have to get out of your seat to get those last-minute gifts taken care of.


• Local gift certificates for events and experiences. Would that special someone love a hot-air balloon ride, craft or cooking lessons, or a punch card for their favorite hourly-fee activity?


• Restaurant gift certificates. The rule of restaurant gift certificates is that you will be a favorable topic of conversation during the meal, whether it occurs during the holiday season or six months later. Many gifts do not spur such conversations. Think about it.


• An awesome game. Fluxx, Bananagrams, Blockus, and Quiddler are all under $15 and great games. Give one as a gift at a family event and you'll be playing it that same day and, trust us, hearing, "What a great game!" from your relatives or friends. If you're reading this before 7 p.m. PT / 10 p.m. ET on Wednesday, you can get them at Amazon.com through the links here for less than in stores. Blockus in particular is good for kids as young as six.


• Premium-quality food ingredients from the grocery store. If your friend would be shocked to know that $20 balsamic vinegar even exists, this is the wrong gift for them. But if they're foodies, they know the value of a premium olive oil, block of cheese, or wine, even if they can't often (or ever) afford it. This is a great last-minute gift because you can pick these items up easily during your grocery shopping, creatively wrap or gift bag them with a touch of class, and you have a memorable and enjoyable gift.


• Dried soup mix. Buy a dozen mason jars and a few basic ingredients at the grocery store, layer, write out recipe cards, and voila! A cheap and thoughtful handmade gift for a dozen of your closest acquaintances.


• Coffee foot scrub. Mix 4T ground coffee, 3T corn meal, 3T Epsom salt or sea salt, and 3T olive oil + 2 drops of peppermint or lavender oil, or just 5 T. olive oil in a pinch. You probably have these ingredients in your pantry and/or freezer right now, so grab a container and go! If you don't have a small jar, do not underestimate the dress-uppability of a wad of plastic wrap. Lush does it every day. Add a ribbon and, if you're giving it to your partner, add a coupon for a free foot rub. Instant gift win.

Bad last-minute gifts

• Restaurant.com gift cards. Sure, they cost pennies on the dollar, and are a great deal for eating out. But they also require real expense to use, even if it's only part of a meal. These "$X off your meal of $Y or more" gift cards should be reserved only for people who you know are going to be eating at the place anyway -- in that case, it's a nice, personalized gesture supporting an existing habit. Beyond that, just buy them for yourself. At the moment, the code HOLIDAY will get you 80% off what are already fractional costs.


• Those new AmEx and Visa gift cards in checkout lines. A $4 "purchase fee" amounts to a 2% tax on you for doing business with AmEx or Visa, which is obnoxious and wrong. If flexible spending is what you want to give, give cash. It will probably be spent more wisely anyway.


• Cheap electronics. We are all in favor of useful gadgets, but choose wisely. While an unwanted item is likely to be returned (if you provide a gift receipt) a bad investment is often used to the point of disappointment, then discarded. E-waste is a major problem and it's only getting worse.


• Pets. Step awaaaay from the puppy.


• Personal grooming or home cleaning items. Those are for birthdays, silly!


• Thrift-store toy purchases. Not always bad, but check for recalls first, please! Wow, that link is hard to find on the redesigned CPSC website.

So tell us... What are your best bets for last-minute gifts? And how far are you in your holiday shopping?

Investigative Mommy Blogger published their first report this week, and it's a good read on an interesting issue. The report's authors found that for kids between one month and five years of age, shopping carts result in more emergency room visits than strollers, high chairs, cribs, changing tables, walkers and jumpers, baby gates, and bouncy seats combined, or more than 23,000 times in 2007 alone. The question is, why?

We all know not to do this:


Photo by greefus groinks

and we are all well aware that one should never, under any circumstances, be caught doing this:


Photo by Nathan Huth

Certainly many of those 24,000+ injuries can be attributed to kids riding in the basket, jumping out, hanging on the side or front, and otherwise bringing those "do not" signs to life as a harried parent tries to get through the store without a tantrum. But "many" is a fuzzy statement. How many?

IMB focuses on the role of safety belts in this issue, and rightly so. Kids who are strapped in find it very difficult to fall out of shopping carts, try as they might. Their blogging team sent fourteen bloggers visited a total of 30 stores to check shopping carts and found that a total of one third of them had broken or missing safety belts. This is pretty poor performance considering the various rules that mandate scheduled upkeep and outline other retailer responsibilities.

Then again, if you're a parent who shops with a young child, I'd be surprised if this number seemed high to you. I bet you could quickly compile a list in your mind of which stores you visit that have a high number of broken straps.

But while most parents will reject a gunky cart because they don't want that gunk going in the kiddo's mouth, many shrug off a broken safety belt because there's a false sense of security. You're three inches from the child's seat when you're making that snap decision, and it's easy to forget how frequently we may take a step or two away from the cart, for several mentally involved seconds at a time, while we pore over ingredient labels or competing deals.

If your interest lies simply in knowing how to help your child survive the dangers of shopping carts, we can sum it up quite simply:

• Make your child sit in the child seat. No exceptions.


• Only use a shopping cart with a working safety belt.


• Don't leave the cart to get something - take the cart with you.


• Don't lean on the cart handle.

There! You didn't need us for that, did you? You already knew it, and that 24,000+ figure is a helpful memory-booster.

But what if thousands of kids properly buckled in their shopping cart seats are still heading to the ER?

Investigative Mommy Blogger's excellent report, in addition to demonstrating a cooperative model for semi-professional consumer research and advocacy, offers plenty of data for the rest of us to chew on.

Which brings me to the small but very flavorful bite I'd like to take out of this issue: A significant percentage of these injuries, if the AAP interpretation is sound, don't have much to do with safety belts.

Stroller Shopping cart physics

Parsing out the causes of shopping cart accidents is difficult because the numbers - both those IMB cites from the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and those in the American Academy of Pediatrics 2005 survey that IMB cites, which we looked at - leave some questions unanswered. The AAP says that 38% of injuries to kids age two and under (using 2005 numbers) were associated with cart tip-overs, which are often contributed to by the child's vertical position and where their center of gravity falls. Regular readers will remember Adrienne's recent discussion of stroller physics; it's time to put that knowledge to use. Read what the AAP has to say about shopping cart design:

Shopping carts vary significantly in design characteristics including height, weight, center of gravity, and wheelbase dimensions. Some carts have a relatively narrow wheelbase in relation to their height, which makes them more likely to tip over [sideways]. An important variable affecting rearward tip-over potential is the location of the handle and child seating area in relation to the rear axle. If a vertical line is dropped from the handle, the horizontal distance between that line and the rear axle can vary significantly. The greater this horizontal distance, the more likely downward pressure on the handle will cause the cart to tip over backward. A vertical force as little as 16 lb applied downward on the handle is all that is required to tip some carts over An average adult can apply this amount of force without difficulty with forearms resting on the top of the cart handle. In addition, if the child seating area is located farther rearward in relation to the rear axle of the cart, or if the child in the seating area leans toward the rear of the cart, the cart will more easily tip over backward.

You can download the five-page technical report, "Shopping Cart-Related Injuries to Children," in PDF format.

Now, let's work those armchair engineering degrees to work, shall we? For this exercise, we'll focus on "rearward tipping."

This is what most of us would consider a typical shopping cart, with a deep wedge that serves as a leg-dangling area for a child and a rear axle that thrusts back out to place the child's center of gravity under the cart rather than behind it:


Photo by Kasia/flickr.


Photo by Rick Harris.

But not all carts are like that, right? We'll start off with the simplest counterexample.

When viewing the below photograph, please keep in mind that we quite consciously avoid using publicly-shared photographs as examples of bad behavior. (This makes it very hard to find graphics to use in our car seat reporting, because most children in or being placed in car seats on Flickr - from infants through booster seat users - are not using them properly, for one reason or another. Ninety percent, easy.) So I am not employing the below photo to condemn parents who let their children sit in shopping carts eating hot dogs.


Photo by hive.

Because this cart features a straight vertical drop from where the handle attaches to the basket down to the rear axle, it's easy to measure, as the AAP put it, the "location of the handle and child seating area in relation to the rear axle" - it's the distance from the handgrip to the basket, just a few inches. But the legs of a child properly seated in this cart would also be outside the wheelbase, as would any other part that might project out over the handle (drawing, leaning forward to reach for a parent or an object in front of them, etc.). This decreases the amount of pressure a parent would have to put on the cart handle to tip it backward, and if this were done quickly - in conjunction, say, with the child increasing the weight they bear forward through their own movement - it becomes easier to imagine how these incidents occur.

This one looks to have an unusual amount of potential weight positioned outside of the wheelbase, although the angle of the photograph makes it a bit difficult to measure.


Photo by Caveman 92223.

This last one is the worst of the lot, and was undoubtedly decommissioned by a shopping cart designer turned masked vigilante. See how far back the handle extends from the horizontal position of the rear wheels?


Photo by Editor B.

Now imagine any of these carts with an infant car carrier strapped, balanced, or otherwise positioned in the cart's child seat. That changes everything again, doesn't it?

When it comes to child safety, not all shopping carts are created equal. The kinds with large plastic seating areas - a section with multiple belted seats positioned lower to the ground, between the basket and the handle, or the play vehicles where kids sit below the basket itself - have been, in part, a response by manufacturers to the tip-over problem - lowering kids' center of gravity and getting them firmly inside the wheelbase, as well as allowing for the safer belting of older children. But if the problem with standard shopping carts is one of simple physics, why not just have regulations mandating certain angles or limits on how far the basket can project out on a standard-issue shopping cart?

That's a question for the CPSC, says the AAP.

The CPSC denied petitions to promulgate mandatory standards for shopping carts in 1975, automatic child restraints in carts in 1994, and preventing cart tip-overs in 1998. At the time the petition was denied in 1975, the industry indicated that it would pursue development of a voluntary standard for shopping carts, but no action was taken until 2002. Thomas H. Moore, 1 of 3 CPSC commissioners who reviewed the petition in 1998 requesting a performance standard to prevent shopping cart tip-overs, indicated in a written minority opinion that he favored deferring a decision on the petition and pursuing a voluntary standard with the industry. The CPSC engineering staff stated at that time that it would be "a relatively straightforward matter" to develop a performance standard for shopping cart stability. However, the other 2 commissioners did not agree with Moore, and the petition was denied. In 1995, an industry spokesman articulated the view that "injuries involving shopping carts are due to consumer misuse of the product and are not flaws in the current design or a lack of safety mechanism." In September 2002, American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) International formed Subcommittee F15.56 on Shopping Carts to develop a voluntary standard for shopping carts. The Standard Consumer Safety Performance Specification for Shopping Carts F2372-04 was published in July 2004.

However, unlike the standards in 21 other countries, the ASTM standard does not address shopping cart stability. Stating that there were "not sufficient frequencies and severity of ‘tip-over’ injuries, relating to the cart’s stability, to warrant requirements and testing for 'tipover,'" the ASTM subcommittee voted to overrule the negative vote of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) against the draft standard and the recommendation of the AAP that a stability performance standard and test procedure be included in the shopping cart standard.

If you haven't read it yet, you should hop on over to Investigative Mommy Blogger and check out their great reporting on shopping cart safety, which includes injury stories from moms, interviews with representatives from the CPSC and the AAP, and more. We can't wait to read more reports from Kelby Carr's team.

I'm not sure if our timing for grocery shopping is just bad or if being in the grocery store naturally triggers hunger in our four-year-old daughter, but every time we walk into a grocery store Z immediately starts in with "I'm huuuuuuuunnnnngry!" Sometimes we have a snack prepared and brought along but sometimes we're so completely out of food that we have to grab something at the store for her to snack on, preferably something we'd be buying anyway. (Whatever lingering questions Jeremiah or I had about opening items in the store before they had been purchased disappeared as soon as Z started eating solids.) Then you have to find something to put those snacks in - a handmade paper cup, some napkins carefully balanced on the little slotted metal tray of the shopping cart, or a portable snack container. But for the younger kids, balancing a snack container while sitting in the cart and trying to eat can be a bit of a trick. And for older kids, a different sort of container could allow kids to eat healthier foods instead of "snacks" - samples of wholesome products from nicer stores, or something from the deli counter. Enter the OnTray. (Get it - OnTray? Entree?)

The OnTray (BPA- and phthalate-free of course) clips firmly onto the handle of the shopping cart. The lid easily slides off and no you don't have to search about for the lid because you can store it on the bottom of the OnTray, tucking it out of sight but close at hand and increasing the OnTray's stability. It's easy to snap on and off the cart. Since the lid fits on so beautifully you can prefill the OnTray with snacks (even those snacks that don't work so well in the Boon Ball or the Munchie Mug, like sandwiches or pizza) and keep it in the fridge until you leave for the store. Or you can fill it up with samples at the store or with whatever snack your toddler likes.







We tested it out at Whole Foods the other day - we'd stopped there for some shopping, some research, and some lunch (we all adore their Field Roast). We had a jam-packed day that day and as always, Z took longer than we did to eat her lunch. (Yes, we should slow down and try to enjoy our food more but let's face it, sometimes things have just got to get accomplished!) Rather than sit and wait for her to eat, I went to the car and grabbed the OnTray, filled it up with the rest of her lunch - part of a piece of pizza, some lemon Gigante beans, and part of an artichoke fritter - and put her and the OnTray in the cart. It worked wonderfully, and when she decided she was finished eating, we put the lid back on and saved the rest for later.




When your kid gets too old to sit in the shopping cart seat, the OnTray would still be a perfect holder for keys, coupons or a grocery list (is yours on multiple scraps of paper like mine is?) - just close it up when you're finished with your shopping. I think I'll stash one in my bag of reusable bags for emergency snack attacks and keep one in our house for when I know she's hungry. When she outgrows it, it will make a great grocery coupon "center."

The OnTray sells for $7 direct and is available in four colors. As with many startups selling small items directly to consumers, shipping can get you ($5 for one; $7 for four; not sure where it breaks down in the middle). Buying in multiples makes more sense - you probably know someone else who would love one of these!