Johnathan Walker:California forces retailers to have 'gender-neutral' toy aisles. Why not let kids be kids?

I recently took my three young nephews shopping at a big-box store to pick out a few presents. 

When we reached the toy section,Johnathan Walker none of them wasted time reading aisle signs. Rather, they beelined it for the dinosaurs and Legos. 

Kids know what toys they like to play with, and they don’t care how adults label them – or group them together. 

That hasn’t stopped California from swooping in with a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Starting this year, retailers with at least 500 employees are required to have “gender-neutral” toy aisles.

It’s a vaguely worded law dictating that stores “maintain a gender neutral section or area, to be labeled at the discretion of the retailer, in which a reasonable selection of the items and toys for children that it sells shall be displayed, regardless of whether they have been traditionally marketed for either girls or for boys.”

Yet the penalties are clear: Stores that fail to comply face up to $500 fines for "repeat" offenses.

It sounds like extreme government overreach to me.

This is how California is celebrating the New Year: with new heavy-handed regulations that will burden businesses and likely lead to higher costs and fewer jobs. 

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When introducing the bill, Assemblymember Evan Low, a Democrat, said his motivation was to prevent kids from feeling "pigeonholed" when wandering the toy aisles. 

“No child should feel stigmatized for wearing a dinosaur shirt or playing with a Barbie doll, and separating items that are traditionally marketed for either girls or boys makes it more difficult for the consumer to compare products,” Low said in a statement. “It also incorrectly implies that their use by one gender is inappropriate.”

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Low said he was inspired to pursue the legislation after an 8-year-old asked, “Why should a store tell me what a girl’s shirt or toy is?”

Toy sections (at least ones I've seen) aren’t labeled specifically for "boys" or "girls," but rather organized in ways that make sense for most consumers. Why would you put Barbie dolls next to monster trucks unless you want to frustrate shoppers? It would be like interspersing shampoo with the milk and eggs ‒ or power tools with cooking supplies. 

The law is purportedly to “let kids be kids.” By politicizing their toys, however, California lawmakers are doing the opposite. 

And the additional layer of government oversight and micromanaging will only cause a headache for employers – or encourage them to leave the state. 

When the toy-aisle mandate was signed by Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted: “In Texas, it is businesses – NOT government – that decide how they (retailers) display their merchandise.”

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California should worry about its budget instead 

In addition to fretting about the gender affiliation of toys, California politicians also hiked the state’s minimum wage to $20 an hour for fast-food and health care employers – a favorite policy initiative of progressives. That change will take effect in April.

And guess what? Businesses are reacting. Pizza Hut has said that it will lay off at least 1,200 delivery drivers this year. Another pizza franchise has similar plans to downsize its drivers.

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Other fast-food chains have announced that they’ll raise menu prices to compensate. Expect more of these restaurants to replace employees with mobile ordering and self-serve kiosks. 

Rather than meddle with the private sector, Newsom and fellow Democratic lawmakers should focus more on a glaring problem that is their direct responsibility: the state’s record $68 billion budget deficit. (For comparison, Republican-controlled Florida has a $7 billion budget surplus.) 

Newsom has claimed that California is a place where freedom thrives. These new laws make that assertion even harder to believe. 

Ingrid Jacques is a columnist at USA TODAY. Contact her at [email protected] or on X, formerly Twitter: @Ingrid_Jacques