you can reasonably assume that non-responding families will respond in the same way as those who did respond, this is not always a safe assumption if the non-respondents are different in some demographic way from your respondents. • Are you asking the questions that will provide the information you need to determine potential need for your child care? Demand is, of course, not totally persistent. It changes with parents’ desires and wants as children leave, new children are added, or family social or economic status changes. Likewise, there is often a surprising delay between the provider’s initiation of efforts to meet demand through specific characteristics of service and the child care consumers’ action to purchase the service. This paradoxical situation where a provider seeks to meet a demonstrated and articulated want but gets no takers, or gets them only after a time, is a function of three important characteristics of child care consumer choice. • There is a natural inertia in consumer choice. People tend to stay with what they have even if they prefer something else. This is particularly true of any service business where the “product” is not tangible, cannot be stored, and creates no ownership interest for the consumer. • Even though many child care consumers stress that they “took what we could get”, such consumers are risk averse where changing providers is concerned. Child care is an “experience good” whose value can only be completely determined after the consumer has experienced the service. In such a case the consumer can be slow to give up an “OK” service for a potentially better one until the consumer is convinced by experience or otherwise (like advertising or word of mouth reputation) that the new service is indeed better at meeting the consumer’s demand. • There may be “switching costs” associated with changing providers. These can be explicit monetary costs of tuition or transportation, or they may be implicit costs of searching out a new provider, handling registration paperwork, dealing with the potential stress andpsychological costs for children and parents of changing providers. 8
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