Many businesses, including entertainment facilities, experience reduced revenues within the weekday daytime. Many don’t recognize that there is a large market out there that can be tapped if you design for them and meet their needs. That market is families with young children. By young children, we are talking about children age 5 and younger.
If we look at married-couple families with both spouses present and one or more children under age 6, 47% of them had a full-time stay-at-home parent in 2011; 40.9% had a full-time stay-at-home mother and 6.1% had a full-time stay-at-home father.
The younger the child’s age, the greater the percentage of stay-at-home mothers. In 2011, for married couples with both spouses present and one or more children under age 3, 44.5% of mothers were full-time stay-at-home moms. But 28% of the employed moms only worked part-time, meaning that in total, 60% of the families had a mother who was home during the weekday full- or part-time.
Stay-at-home moms (and dads too) with young children search out places where they can meet up with the other mothers with young children (and dads with dads) and socialize while their children are occupied. Those at-home parents have led to the growth and success of play cafes and children’s discovery farms that specifically target that market niche and also to children’s edutainment centers that attract those parents during the weekday. It is a revenue potential that many location-based leisure business fail to understand and capture.
About Randy White
Randy White is CEO and co-founder of the White Hutchinson Leisure & Learning Group. The 31-year-old company, with offices in Kansas City, Missouri, has worked for over 600 clients in 37 countries throughout the world. Projects the company has designed and produced have won seventeen 1st place awards. Randy is considered to be one of the world's foremost authorities on feasibility, brand development, design and production of leisure experience destinations including entertainment, eatertainment, edutainment, agritainment/agritourism, play and leisure facilities.
Randy was featured on the Food Network's Unwrapped television show as an eatertainment expert, quoted as an entertainment/edutainment center expert in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Times and Time magazine and received recognition for family-friendly designs by Pizza Today magazine. One of the company's projects was featured as an example of an edutainment project in the book The Experience Economy. Numerous national newspapers have interviewed him as an expert on shopping center and mall entertainment and retail-tainment.
Randy is a graduate of New York University. Prior to repositioning the company in 1989 to work exclusively in the leisure and learning industry, White Hutchinson was active in the retail/commercial real estate industry as a real estate consultancy specializing in workouts/turnarounds of commercial projects. In the late 1960s to early 1980s, Randy managed a diversified real estate development company that developed, owned and managed over 2.0 million square feet of shopping centers and mixed-use projects and 2,000 acres of residential subdivisions. Randy has held the designations of CSM (Certified Shopping Center Manager) and Certified Retail Property Executive (CRX) from the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC).
He has authored over 150 articles that have been published in over 40 leading entertainment/leisure and early childhood education industry magazines and journals and has been a featured speaker and keynoter at over 40 different conventions and trade groups.
Randy is the editor of his company's Leisure eNewsletter, has a blog and posts on Twitter and Linkedin.
