This paper examines several hypotheses about access to different types and sizes of retail establishments by residents of poor and non‐poor urban neighborhoods, using Chicago as a case study. As expected, poor zip code areas in Chicago have fewer and smaller retail outlets overall than nonpoor areas, including fewer supermarkets, banks, and large drug stores. After controlling for purchasing power, poor areas still lack large drug stores but, surprisingly, not banks and supermarkets. Residents of poor neighborhoods must travel more than two miies to have access to the same numbers of supermarkets, large drug stores, banks, and other types of stores as residents of nonpoor areas.

Expressions of positive attitudes toward the environment are only weakly related to the consumption of alternatives to products that are environmentally unfriendly. Yet, socially concerned marketers and public policy makers still appeal to general environmental concern (GEC) when trying to demarket environmentally sensitive products or market more friendly alternatives. In this article, we propose that GEC has an indirect effect on purchase intentions for environmentally related products and the relation is mediated by product-specific attitudes about consequences of using the environmentally related product as well as the product's environmental attributes. We tested the model among 210 users of disposable diapers, a product that is not environmentally friendly. The results support the proposition that GEC has only an indirect effect on purchase intentions for disposable diapers. Implications for marketers and public policy makers are discussed.

Preschool children's visual attention to nearly three hours of a heterogeneous sample of children's programing was examined in relationship to the presence of 37 simple visual and auditory attributes of television programs. A factor analysis of the attributes indicated that they were largely independent, with the exception of two factors, which were labeled "women and children" and "puppets." Attributes and factors that were positively related to attention were the puppet factor, women and children factor, auditory changes, peculiar voices, movement, cuts, sound effects, laughter, and applause. Attributes that were negatively related to attention were adult male voices, extended zooms and pans, eye contact, and still shots. Other attributes had both positive and negative effects on attention depending on whether the child was looking at the TV at the time the attribute occurred. It is suggested that attributes are positive or negative to the degree to which they signal informative comprehensible content.Sixteen years ago McLuhan (McLuhan, 1964) suggested that the form of a message is a critical determinant of its impact. Nevertheless, research on children's television viewing has concentrated primarily on message content rather than form. Recently, however, there has been a growing research interest in the formal properties of the television medium. This interest stems not only from McLuhan's ideas, but also from a general growth of cog-

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Suspense is a cognitive and emotional reaction that is evoked by time‐dependent structural characteristics of an unfolding dramatic narrative. Suspense within narratives is defined and its structural antecedents, based on characteristics of suspense that have been studied within the context of film and fiction, are identified. Results of three studies offer evidence that suspenseful commercials can be identified and discriminated from other types of commercials. As they watch, viewers of suspenseful commercials show a combination of hope and fear emotional responses. A parameter of online hope and fear responses is positively correlated with attitude toward the ad for suspenseful, but not for nonsuspenseful, commercials. Perceptions of suspense‐related characteristics predict attitude toward the ad for suspenseful commercials, but are 1 of several predictors for nonsuspenseful commercials. A negative aspect of suspenseful commercials is that there is less brand–content integration.