Our 14 year old just now in the car: “Ok, I’m officially over Prime.”
Our 11 year old right after: “Ok, I’m officially into Prime.”
They had just been to our local VitaminShoppe and emerged with one bottle of the drink you’d think contained a miracle elixir instead of just coconut water and a bunch of ingredients I can’t pronounce. Supposedly when they opened the door to enter the store and the clerk saw two boys he didn’t even miss a beat and just said “They’re over there.”
This drink is a lesson in just how influential influencers are and how clever and irresistible (and HIGHLY lucrative) you can make a product just by promoting it to the perfect captive target audience: kids. Even higher education powerhouses like Duke and USC have gotten the memo about how lucrative being an influencer can be by starting to offer classes on how to be an effective influencer as part of there business classes.
Prime, and I am not talking about the Amazon kind of Prime, entered into our family’s world at the beginning of this year. It was allusive and unavailable in our area, sold out and hard to find. Perfect way to build the hype, right? It was easy to say no. Can’t find it, won’t buy. And then on a random Wednesday our then 13 year old made a dinner suggestion at just the right time. “I really feel like a burrito mom.” I was like giddy elated - I know, I need to get out more but when your 13 year old solves the dinner debate on a night when you hadn’t planned anything and can’t fathom making anything, you get happy. “I’ll even go with you” he said. How awesome was this I thought. And when we got there and I was about to order the lightbulb finally went on and realized I had just gotten completely played: they were now selling Prime.
To be fair, this food establishment is in the “high-school off-campus lunch” corridor in our small town so someone made a wise business decision by offering Prime at a premium price. I suppose it’s the for profit reselling of a drink that to me doesn’t even taste that special that bothers me the most. I mean we even got a message from our younger son’s school last week that a student was bringing Prime to school and selling it during snack time for $5 a bottle and making a profit! Though entrepreneurial l in spirit, that little side business was abruptly stopped by school officials.
But I have learned (or am learning) to step back and reflect before unleashing my inner Judge Judy on things like this and decided to take Prime and our older son’s unrelenting fascination with it as an opportunity to learn from him about how he found out about it in the first place, what he thinks makes it so amazing and then talk with him about how easily we are all seduced by products and clever marketing. We didn’t forbid him to buy it but we don’t buy it for him either. His money he can spend his way, even if I so wish he spent it on something else.
Now you occasionally see Prime at Safeway and probably at some point this year it will make it onto the shelf at 7-Eleven somewhere between bottles of Gatorade and Vitamin Water or into the line-up of drink options at the local little league snack shack. Until then, I know someone who knows someone who may someone who can get you a good deal on a case of it. Wink-wink.