conuly

I'm kinda rolling my eyes because I'd like to know what part of this woman thought bringing a non-Pleasant Company doll to a Pleasant Company store would be okay? Granted, the website doesn't specifically say "PC dolls only!", but I think most people would infer (correctly!) that when going to a brand-specific store, non-brand items would be frowned on at best.

My guess is the stylist didn't say "This isn't a real doll!" exactly, but something more along the lines of "This isn't a Pleasant Company doll." and the mother is remembering inaccurately.

My take on it: PC is perfectly happy to do things with PC dolls. These are their products. They screw it up, fine, they'll fix it. Other products, well, those aren't theirs, and they won't take responsibility for what happens to them. To make things easier on them, they just won't do anything with non-PC products. Period.

There is most likely a policy in place regarding this and, like so many policies, if broken, the employee in question probably loses his or her job. For me, between an upset six-year-old and next month's rent, guess what! My rent wins!

And rather than say to herself, "This was a bad idea, we shouldn't have brought a non-PC product here and expected to be served." the mother chose to bring out the "customer is always right!" card.

Sorry, mommy, but I'm with Pleasant Company on this one. The customer is not always right, rules can, but are not mean to be bent, and stylists (most employees, in fact) make on-the-spot judgements at the risk of losing their jobs. Lose!

(This is not to condone whatever rude comments people in the store may have said, but I seriously doubt mommy was the angel she's making herself out to be.)

Also:
If it had been my daughter, and other mothers would have made ugly comments they would have either gotten spit in the face or punched.

Nice comment from a mouse. Sweet.

Long comment for the win!

From:

conuly

Pleasant Company got bought out by Mattel, so they're Mattel dolls now, aren't they?

Momblogger wasn't there, I think - it was her kid's friend's mom. Which makes this story, at best, second-hand... and if it's second-hand from the report of the upset six-year-old, all bets are off.

From:

Did they? Oh well. Repeat comment, replacing Pleasant Company with Mattel. There. XD

I missed that somehow. That actually makes me believe the story even less.

From:

conuly

It's not that I don't believe it happened... I just don't believe it happened like this.

(Though, as I pointed out over on

feminist, the post is entitled "Fake, out". Or, perhaps, "Fakeout". So maybe it didn't happen at all.)

From:

See, that's the thing. It's a plausible situation. A stylist could have refused to style a doll's hair. A child could have been upset by that. Surrounding mothers could have said rude things.

But that doesn't mean it happened like stated in the story. Or at all.

And for me, personally, while I think that something LIKE this happened (refusal, upset, possibly rude mothers), I don't think that the story in question is the right one.

Does that make sense? D: Should I just give up and go to bed?

From:

conuly

No, that's exactly what I'm thinking. It makes perfect sense.

From:

adiva_calandia

If it's secondhand from a six-year-old, that would explain the odd phrasing of "a real doll." I know when I was six, I would've described things in terms like that.

From:

conuly

It would also explain some of the tragic story - I know that at the age of six, I was a pretty black-and-white thinker. If I was crying, it was because the world was full of villians, not because the world is full of people.

From:

Yes, and now they're American Girl LLC; sort of a separate branch.

From:

Oh, before I forget, having attempted doll hair reroots, the fact that they don't style other products' hair actually makes sense to me. Some cheaper brands (actually, a LOT of cheaper brands) do a shoddy job rooting the doll hair, so it's ridiculously easy to pull it out in the course of normal play. There are also different fiber types used for different brands, some of which are more brittle than others and not meant to be moved out of the style they're in. (It can be done, but they break pretty easily.) Good fibers can be styled and restyled (to an extent). Cheap ones can't. So when they say they won't do it for fear of damage, that's fine by me.

Second long comment, for the win!

From:

conuly

Ah, thank you.

From:

I don't know what they do to the hair but I can understand the concern of damaging hair of another doll. If they use any chemical or fears that even water would cause a dye to run, or any slight bit of heat to melt it, and so on.

I would have assumed that you would bring an AG doll to the place, I never would have thought about bringing another doll there. K had an AG doll (she saved up forever for it), and she went to the place with my mom but without the doll. She wasn't insane about them, only kind of liked them.

What kind of bugged me about the post was the wearing the lack of fancy doll like a badge, people who seem to look down on people who do spend a lot of money on things.

Did the stylist say not a real doll or not a real AG doll. I bet it was the latter, the other one sounds so ODD to say.

I am so tempted to make a remark about how if they could afford to live in Brownstone Brooklyn, they could afford an AG doll. But catty me won't say that. :P

They should, though, at AG, have a contingency plan for non AG dolls, just put bows in their hair or something. But the thing is if they screw up on an AG doll they replace the hair/heads. They ahve a whole doll hospital thing for that. If they mess up a non AG (even putting a bow in and accidentally yanking some hair out) they might not be able to fix it, I don't know. :/ Who knows, maybe something like that did happen and some kid freaked out and the family threatened to sue for emotional damage for ruining some kid's non AG doll.

From:

conuly

Agreeeeeeeeed on everything, especially the "real doll" part sounding bizarre.

From:

sunnydale47.livejournal.com

They should, though, at AG, have a contingency plan for non AG dolls, just put bows in their hair or something.

This is what I was thinking. I was really angry at American Girl Place when I heard about this, although I had only heard the mother's side and not the comments of the cooler heads here. I didn't think AG should have had to style the knock-off doll's hair, but rather that they handled it extremely poorly.

They could have said kindly, "That's a lovely doll, honey. I'm sorry, we can't do the hairstyle you wanted because she has a different type of hair than the dolls we have here, but I can do something pretty for her. Would you like a bow in her hair, or a ribbon?"

That would have made all the difference in the world to a six-year-old who loves her doll, rather than saying "That's not a real doll," or even "That's not a real American Girl doll." Etta might still have been upset because the stylist wouldn't do the hairstyle she wanted, but courtesy and thoughtfulness would have considerably softened the blow.

As for not believing it happened this way, having lived the first 21 years of my life in NYC, plus another seven years on the Island, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the stylist was that harsh. I know Connie lives in NYC too, and her experience is certainly more recent than mine, so perhaps New Yorkers have become kinder and gentler since I left the area in 1976. But one of my primary reasons for wanting to get away from NYC and its environs were because people were so cold, uncaring and suspicious.

That's not to say there aren't some wonderful people there -- there are many! But the prevailing culture, as I experienced it for almost three decades, was self-centered -- particularly in business contexts. It didn't seem that people were unwilling to put themselves in anyone else's shoes so much as it apparently just never even occurred to them. The majority of people were too impatient and/or too busy looking out for numero uno to notice or care how others felt. So I can easily imagine the stylist snapping impatiently at Etta and moms making snarky comments.

From:

Just for the record, other than this past year in Dubuque, and a year in London and two in Frankfurt, I spent my 38 years in NYC.

I don't see NYC like that at all -- it is a lot friendlier than the Midwest, or Europe, if you ask me. It appears like the Midwest is friendly, but they're mostly pushy and nosey it seems. NYC may sound abrupt but are usually good, solid people, if in a bit of a hurry. I feel that their respecting personal space gives them a bad reputation. It's not so much that they are looking out for number one, but don't want to be in your face because everyone is stuck together so closely. I've actually given this a lot of thought.

And maybe it is more recent experience, I was born in 1969. 1988-89 was Frankfurt, and 1996-98 was London. Dubuque was last March until now.

So I stand by my assessment of the stylist. I doubt she put it that way, in fact the language sounds so bizarre "that isn't a real doll".

From:

I think this whole story is a bunch of mess and there's holes in it left and right. We discussed this on my AG eljay comm (yes, I collect AG, can't you tell? =P)

My outtake? The salon lady may have been a jerk--I can see that. But the mom was wrong to not realize that they would not do anything with a non AG doll at AG PLACE, anymore than you go to Walmart and try to buy Target stuff. And this story's very suspicious I work in customer service. I get a LOT of entitlement people. I get people who swear that they are entitled to stay on hold for an hour and tie up my phone because they want to and get mad when I hang up after a polite dismissal.

My Beth Cady Doll is a very elegant doll, and I love her to pieces. But she is NOT an AG and I would never expect them to do her hair. The salon's a ripoff anyways--you can only pick like, six styles off a sheet, and one's braids and one's a PONYTAIL. Outfits cost about 20 dollars at times. Hmm... a lasting outfit, or a hairstyle I will eventually have to take down?

From:

Agreed ... as someone who has one of the original AG dolls with the real human hair, and has sent her off to the nice AG people more than once to have it trimmed and re-braided. (I'm *so glad* they stopped doing that, btw. I mean, using real hair. I guess they sell too many now to keep using it.)

My whole family collects them, though I do so sort of against my will—my mother decided when I was a baby that I collect dolls, so I was sort of forced into it. In any case, I have Molly, Josefina, and one of the babies (horrified my great-grandmother by asking for the black one, back when black and blonde were the only choices); my sister has Samantha and Addy (my great-grandmother had passed on by then); and my mother has Kirsten and Felicity. And yes, we went to the Felicity launch party in Williamsburg, my mother's favorite place in the whole world.

I'm betting the little girl told her mother "She said my doll isn't real!" and in the mother's head that became "She said, 'This doll isn't real.'"

From:

woofiegrrl.livejournal.com

How do you like your Bitty Baby? I have always thought they were a little odd, and I don't usually look through that section of the AG catalog (or Angelina Ballerina for that matter).

I only have one AG doll, a Girl of Today, but my wife has Felicity (the ENTIRE set), and her sister who is 24 has Addy, Samantha, and Molly (or is it another Felicity?).

From:

I always thought the blond one was a little weird, which is why I got the African-American one. The other three look much better.

I only have a couple outfits--in fact, she's packed up in my parents' basement since I moved cross-country last year. I do have Molly and Josefina here.

When they used to have that newsletter with contests to choose the Next American Girl (Addy and Josefina were two of the winners, I don't know if Kit was or not) I entered telling them to create a Girl of Today and they did, but I'm not sure that I really get the credit for that. ;-) In any case, the Girl of Today came out when I was late in high school so I never got into it—maybe someday I'll go back to collecting, but it's not a top priority right now.

From:

starcat-jewel.livejournal.com

(visiting vis

sunnydale47)

IMO, the real issue here is deceptive advertising. Nowhere on the website does it say anything about only AG dolls being eligible. Maybe that's a reasonable assumption to make... but if this had happened in Texas, they would soon be talking to a different kind of AG. And you know what they say about "assume".

From:

conuly

I agree, that is a major concern. But it's not what people are reacting to, nor anything that I doubt.

From:

I'm kinda rolling my eyes because I'd like to know what part of this woman thought bringing a non-Pleasant Company doll to a Pleasant Company store would be okay? Granted, the website doesn't specifically say "PC dolls only!", but I think most people would infer (correctly!) that when going to a brand-specific store, non-brand items would be frowned on at best.

My guess is the stylist didn't say "This isn't a real doll!" exactly, but something more along the lines of "This isn't a Pleasant Company doll." and the mother is remembering inaccurately.

My take on it: PC is perfectly happy to do things with PC dolls. These are their products. They screw it up, fine, they'll fix it. Other products, well, those aren't theirs, and they won't take responsibility for what happens to them. To make things easier on them, they just won't do anything with non-PC products. Period.

There is most likely a policy in place regarding this and, like so many policies, if broken, the employee in question probably loses his or her job. For me, between an upset six-year-old and next month's rent, guess what! My rent wins!

And rather than say to herself, "This was a bad idea, we shouldn't have brought a non-PC product here and expected to be served." the mother chose to bring out the "customer is always right!" card.

Sorry, mommy, but I'm with Pleasant Company on this one. The customer is not always right, rules can, but are not mean to be bent, and stylists (most employees, in fact) make on-the-spot judgements at the risk of losing their jobs. Lose!

(This is not to condone whatever rude comments people in the store may have said, but I seriously doubt mommy was the angel she's making herself out to be.)

Also:
If it had been my daughter, and other mothers would have made ugly comments they would have either gotten spit in the face or punched.

Nice comment from a mouse. Sweet.

Long comment for the win!

From:

conuly

Pleasant Company got bought out by Mattel, so they're Mattel dolls now, aren't they?

Momblogger wasn't there, I think - it was her kid's friend's mom. Which makes this story, at best, second-hand... and if it's second-hand from the report of the upset six-year-old, all bets are off.

From:

Did they? Oh well. Repeat comment, replacing Pleasant Company with Mattel. There. XD

I missed that somehow. That actually makes me believe the story even less.

From:

conuly

It's not that I don't believe it happened... I just don't believe it happened like this.

(Though, as I pointed out over on

feminist, the post is entitled "Fake, out". Or, perhaps, "Fakeout". So maybe it didn't happen at all.)

From:

See, that's the thing. It's a plausible situation. A stylist could have refused to style a doll's hair. A child could have been upset by that. Surrounding mothers could have said rude things.

But that doesn't mean it happened like stated in the story. Or at all.

And for me, personally, while I think that something LIKE this happened (refusal, upset, possibly rude mothers), I don't think that the story in question is the right one.

Does that make sense? D: Should I just give up and go to bed?

From:

conuly

No, that's exactly what I'm thinking. It makes perfect sense.

From:

adiva_calandia

If it's secondhand from a six-year-old, that would explain the odd phrasing of "a real doll." I know when I was six, I would've described things in terms like that.

From:

conuly

It would also explain some of the tragic story - I know that at the age of six, I was a pretty black-and-white thinker. If I was crying, it was because the world was full of villians, not because the world is full of people.

From:

Yes, and now they're American Girl LLC; sort of a separate branch.

From:

Oh, before I forget, having attempted doll hair reroots, the fact that they don't style other products' hair actually makes sense to me. Some cheaper brands (actually, a LOT of cheaper brands) do a shoddy job rooting the doll hair, so it's ridiculously easy to pull it out in the course of normal play. There are also different fiber types used for different brands, some of which are more brittle than others and not meant to be moved out of the style they're in. (It can be done, but they break pretty easily.) Good fibers can be styled and restyled (to an extent). Cheap ones can't. So when they say they won't do it for fear of damage, that's fine by me.

Second long comment, for the win!

From:

conuly

Ah, thank you.

From:

I don't know what they do to the hair but I can understand the concern of damaging hair of another doll. If they use any chemical or fears that even water would cause a dye to run, or any slight bit of heat to melt it, and so on.

I would have assumed that you would bring an AG doll to the place, I never would have thought about bringing another doll there. K had an AG doll (she saved up forever for it), and she went to the place with my mom but without the doll. She wasn't insane about them, only kind of liked them.

What kind of bugged me about the post was the wearing the lack of fancy doll like a badge, people who seem to look down on people who do spend a lot of money on things.

Did the stylist say not a real doll or not a real AG doll. I bet it was the latter, the other one sounds so ODD to say.

I am so tempted to make a remark about how if they could afford to live in Brownstone Brooklyn, they could afford an AG doll. But catty me won't say that. :P

They should, though, at AG, have a contingency plan for non AG dolls, just put bows in their hair or something. But the thing is if they screw up on an AG doll they replace the hair/heads. They ahve a whole doll hospital thing for that. If they mess up a non AG (even putting a bow in and accidentally yanking some hair out) they might not be able to fix it, I don't know. :/ Who knows, maybe something like that did happen and some kid freaked out and the family threatened to sue for emotional damage for ruining some kid's non AG doll.

From:

conuly

Agreeeeeeeeed on everything, especially the "real doll" part sounding bizarre.

From:

sunnydale47.livejournal.com

They should, though, at AG, have a contingency plan for non AG dolls, just put bows in their hair or something.

This is what I was thinking. I was really angry at American Girl Place when I heard about this, although I had only heard the mother's side and not the comments of the cooler heads here. I didn't think AG should have had to style the knock-off doll's hair, but rather that they handled it extremely poorly.

They could have said kindly, "That's a lovely doll, honey. I'm sorry, we can't do the hairstyle you wanted because she has a different type of hair than the dolls we have here, but I can do something pretty for her. Would you like a bow in her hair, or a ribbon?"

That would have made all the difference in the world to a six-year-old who loves her doll, rather than saying "That's not a real doll," or even "That's not a real American Girl doll." Etta might still have been upset because the stylist wouldn't do the hairstyle she wanted, but courtesy and thoughtfulness would have considerably softened the blow.

As for not believing it happened this way, having lived the first 21 years of my life in NYC, plus another seven years on the Island, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the stylist was that harsh. I know Connie lives in NYC too, and her experience is certainly more recent than mine, so perhaps New Yorkers have become kinder and gentler since I left the area in 1976. But one of my primary reasons for wanting to get away from NYC and its environs were because people were so cold, uncaring and suspicious.

That's not to say there aren't some wonderful people there -- there are many! But the prevailing culture, as I experienced it for almost three decades, was self-centered -- particularly in business contexts. It didn't seem that people were unwilling to put themselves in anyone else's shoes so much as it apparently just never even occurred to them. The majority of people were too impatient and/or too busy looking out for numero uno to notice or care how others felt. So I can easily imagine the stylist snapping impatiently at Etta and moms making snarky comments.

From:

Just for the record, other than this past year in Dubuque, and a year in London and two in Frankfurt, I spent my 38 years in NYC.

I don't see NYC like that at all -- it is a lot friendlier than the Midwest, or Europe, if you ask me. It appears like the Midwest is friendly, but they're mostly pushy and nosey it seems. NYC may sound abrupt but are usually good, solid people, if in a bit of a hurry. I feel that their respecting personal space gives them a bad reputation. It's not so much that they are looking out for number one, but don't want to be in your face because everyone is stuck together so closely. I've actually given this a lot of thought.

And maybe it is more recent experience, I was born in 1969. 1988-89 was Frankfurt, and 1996-98 was London. Dubuque was last March until now.

So I stand by my assessment of the stylist. I doubt she put it that way, in fact the language sounds so bizarre "that isn't a real doll".

From:

I think this whole story is a bunch of mess and there's holes in it left and right. We discussed this on my AG eljay comm (yes, I collect AG, can't you tell? =P)

My outtake? The salon lady may have been a jerk--I can see that. But the mom was wrong to not realize that they would not do anything with a non AG doll at AG PLACE, anymore than you go to Walmart and try to buy Target stuff. And this story's very suspicious I work in customer service. I get a LOT of entitlement people. I get people who swear that they are entitled to stay on hold for an hour and tie up my phone because they want to and get mad when I hang up after a polite dismissal.

My Beth Cady Doll is a very elegant doll, and I love her to pieces. But she is NOT an AG and I would never expect them to do her hair. The salon's a ripoff anyways--you can only pick like, six styles off a sheet, and one's braids and one's a PONYTAIL. Outfits cost about 20 dollars at times. Hmm... a lasting outfit, or a hairstyle I will eventually have to take down?

From:

Agreed ... as someone who has one of the original AG dolls with the real human hair, and has sent her off to the nice AG people more than once to have it trimmed and re-braided. (I'm *so glad* they stopped doing that, btw. I mean, using real hair. I guess they sell too many now to keep using it.)

My whole family collects them, though I do so sort of against my will—my mother decided when I was a baby that I collect dolls, so I was sort of forced into it. In any case, I have Molly, Josefina, and one of the babies (horrified my great-grandmother by asking for the black one, back when black and blonde were the only choices); my sister has Samantha and Addy (my great-grandmother had passed on by then); and my mother has Kirsten and Felicity. And yes, we went to the Felicity launch party in Williamsburg, my mother's favorite place in the whole world.

I'm betting the little girl told her mother "She said my doll isn't real!" and in the mother's head that became "She said, 'This doll isn't real.'"

From:

woofiegrrl.livejournal.com

How do you like your Bitty Baby? I have always thought they were a little odd, and I don't usually look through that section of the AG catalog (or Angelina Ballerina for that matter).

I only have one AG doll, a Girl of Today, but my wife has Felicity (the ENTIRE set), and her sister who is 24 has Addy, Samantha, and Molly (or is it another Felicity?).

From: