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Kinder-Care caters to a diverse and finicky clientele—infants in diapers to twelve-year-olds who participate in after-school programs. During the centers' eleven-hour day (7 a.m. to 6 p.m.), the young customers are offered hot breakfasts and lunches, swimming in a standardized 12-by 20-ft. pool, kindergarten-style teaching and Kinder Kits containing weekly study themes. Two staple objects of modern kid culture are missing: television and junk food. Mendel believes that kids thrive without them. The squealing children seem to enjoy the place, and parents appear to have no qualms about sending them there. Says Mendel: "We took the guilt [of leaving her child] away from the working mother."
Franchising, in which outsiders paid for operating rights to a Kinder-Care center, was tried and abandoned after service declined. Today the company owns about a fifth of its centers and leases the rest from developers, who pay for land and construction. This allows Kinder-Care to operate all its centers and expand with a minimum of cash. At the Montgomery headquarters building, in a sleek office park, a staff of 26 tracks purchases of everything from modeling clay to transportation vans. Center directors send in seven forms a week, reporting on matters as varied as attendance, roof repairs and bad checks. A supervisor visits each center every week, and Mendel, tooling around in a white Cadillac, often makes unannounced inspections.
Already the company is "diversifying." For sale at the centers are toys, T shirts and dancing lessons: insurance policies for kids are coming in the fall. Mendel is not worried about competition from any larger company that may try to enter the field, for it seems big enough for all comers. The nation is overflowing with 5 million preschool children of working women, and Mendel's law is that most of those kids could use better care than they are getting.