WSJ - Kids, This is a Dollar Bill
Catbert
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The First Money Lesson to Teach Your Children: This Is What a Dollar Looks Like
Growing up in a world where purchases play out in swipes and clicks, the notion of cash as a medium of exchange can get lost on some children; ‘it’s not something they see’
By Harriet Torry
Ralph Pantozzi, a math teacher in Summit, N.J., said his school’s lemonade stand sometimes puzzles some of the third-graders who run it. It isn’t usually the math, or dealing with customers, that stumps them.
It’s the hard currency.
“We see them with their cash register and they’re picking up the money and I know they look at it sort of ‘what do I do with this?,’ ” he said. “They’re really not used to it.”Teaching youngsters the value of dollars and cents is a task that has vexed parents for generations. Now parents face a new challenge: delivering the lesson in a world where children rarely encounter actual money.
Mr. Pantozzi said when a relative presents his 13-year- old daughter with physical cash as a gift, “she’ll be eager to give it to us right away” for quick transfer “so it can be in her account so she knows that she can use it.” She has a bank account that comes with a debit card and tracks how much money is in her allowance through an app.
Retailers notice bewilderment when young customers come into their stores armed with the paper money they have been given for holidays or a birthday.“Sometimes the kids that are given cash, even the idea that it’s not a gift card is completely foreign,” said Gaetana Schueckler, who has owned The TreeHouse Toy Store in Buffalo, N.Y., since 1996.
For years, one of its top sellers was a toy cash register. The store doesn’t even carry them anymore, since “for kids, it’s not something they see,” said Ms. Schueckler.
Monopoly has gone cashless: A version of the board game called Monopoly Ultimate Banking Edition ditches the traditional paper Monopoly money in favor of buying and selling properties with a bank card.“It’s so much easier to play with a card but it takes the math aspect out of the game,” said Tamara Bennett, a 34- year-old business owner in Benton, Ky., who has played it with her two sons. “It’s just like with real money, if you’ve got cash in your hand, it hurts a bit to give it away. With a card, it doesn’t hurt as much.”Her son Brett, who is 8, likes the card version because players can’t steal money, although he enjoys playing with the physical Monopoly money, too, because he can throw it up in the air.
His 12-year-old brother, Travis, buys snacks at school using funds deducted from a computerized account rather than with cash. He sometimes gets paper money as presents but also receives gift cards to buy things such as videogames.“It’s a bit easier to use a gift card because you just have to keep up with one thing, you don’t have to keep up with all your money,” said Travis.
Methods of electronic payment have broadened beyond credit and debit cards to mobile wallets, online transfers, apps and even wearable-payment devices. Many school lunch lines are automated, with kids using preloaded cards to buy food at the cafeteria.
Sharon Light’s daughter Orit, age 6, sees physical cash on Mondays when she receives three $1 bills from her parents to divide into jars she keeps for spending, saving and donating—an allowance-distribution system for kids popularized by Ron Lieber’s book “The Opposite of Spoiled.” Orit, who lives in Silver Spring, Md., said her preferred method of shopping is “the computer because I have to give money but I don’t have to take a big car trip.”She recently discovered a new method of payment when a friend gave her a gift card for Target. for her birthday. “She was really excited about it, I think because it looks like a credit card,” said her mother.For her last birthday party, 11- year-old Madison Harris’s parents treated her and some friends to a $25 gift card each to spend together at a mall in Chicago. “She had some friends who were spending money just willy-nilly and they had ran out of money before we got to the second store,” said her father, Craig J. Harris.
“Some of the girls came up to us like, can you put more money on my card? I was like, no, we gave you $25,” the 52-year-old television and film producer said.Mr. Harris has tried other ways to instill hard lessons about money without cold cash. When his older daughter, Milan, was younger he gave her a prepaid debit card and counseled her to think carefully about her spending.
Once, her card was declined in a fast-food restaurant in Chicago due to insufficient funds. “It was kind of typical teenager, she turned around like ‘whoa, you’re going to get it, right?,’ ” Mr. Harris recalled. He paid.Mr. Harris said that led to a larger conversation about her spending habits. “I just used that as a teaching moment,” he said.
His daughter, now 20, rarely uses cash, though the lessons stuck. She got sent a credit card recently and plans to shred it. She doesn’t really see the point of having it and buying something if she can’t afford it, she said.
When Karen Lewis-Benoit, of Brooklyn, N.Y., shops with her two children using cards, she tries to instruct them on the connection between hours worked, saving, and the fact that money has to physically go to the creditor.“When my bills come in I let them see me online: This is Mommy paying bills. Do you see all those things that we purchased? At this store and that store, guess what, here is the bill.”A recent survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta found 12% of consumers didn’t pay with cash, even once, in 2017. A 2018 survey by the Pew Research Center, a think tank, found 29% of Americans made no purchases using cash during a typical week.
The notion that people spend more dough when using plastic is one that 10-year-old Josephina Corona learned selling Girl Scout cookies over the past six years.Her troop’s cookie booth accepts card payments using a phone and Square card-reader. Josephina, who lives in Monroe, N.J., also has a Girl Scout website for selling cookies, and each year she emails the link to family, friends and previous customers.“Door-to-door they buy a few boxes, online they buy five or more— usually because if you buy five you get a chance to win free Girl Scout cookies for a year,” she said.
Lani Noel’s 8-year-old daughter Sophia earns pocket money by depositing the household recycling, and occasionally gets cash from the Tooth Fairy.“She tucks that money away into her piggy bank and she has a disconnect in terms of how that money then turns into the purchasing of goods, because we then buy mostly everything online or via a credit card,” said Ms. Noel, who lives in Los Angeles. “It’s more like a collectible item.”
Write to Harriet Torry at harriet.torry@wsj.com
"Got a flaming heart, can't get my fill"
Comments
Sad.
Future collectors in the making!
Kids, this is a dollar coin. It’s how things should be. Paper dollars should be obsolete.
If I could multiple like your post I would!
Change.... societal change that is....is inevitable and human society will continue to change... until there are no more humans. Each generation seems to lament the loss of some practices or products. So it will continue.... Cheers, RickO
It's not just money, but other units of measure as well. A few years ago, I went to a fast food chicken place for chicken strips. The menu said they sell either 6, 9 or 12 strips. I said I would like half a dozen chicken strips and was told, we only sell 6, 9 or 12 strips and can't sell you half a dozen. I said ok, how about a dozen chicken strips and again told, this time in a more harsher voice, I can't sell a dozen chicken strips, only 6, 9 or 12, sir.
Ronctx,
I feel your pain of this "The New World Odor"
100% Positive BST transactions
I've noticed rounding off has become such a problem that I usually don't do it anymore.
Say the item is $1.57 and you hand them a five dollar bill, a nickel & 2 pennies.
Complete galactic de-lamination
My Saint Set
You cannot do this .
Three layers of management will have to be consulted.
I used do this all the time. Sometimes I’d have to explain why I’m doing this and walk people through it but only about 20% of the time.
I’ve noticed that with turn-by-turn GPS and directions, some people also can’t read maps any more.
As a kid at the parts store, I had a cash box and a NCR receipt tablet.
A paper tax table was taped to the underside of the lid.
We had a calculator but it was always being used or wherever "the girl" put it.
It would take less time to figure it out yourself than go looking for it.
Usually I'd be the one asking "ya-got a nickel ?" or "I'll give ya 2 quarters for 2 pennies"
My Saint Set
You guys really would carry dollar coins in your pockets ?
That would make me sick........
The 'Greenback' has been the planets standard currency for many, many years. Why give it up?
Name another first world country (or any country) that still uses a $1 equivalent bill? If they can do it, what’s holding us back?
35 years ago, I won a trip to Hawaii, converted to cash & took family 3 kids, wife, Mom , & Brother to S. Padre Island to beachouse for Christmas. Divided balace to everybody. $ 700 and change to each. No Christmas gifts, no cards, not going to buy them anything including food and soda, although we could eat meals at beachhouse. Anything they wanted, they could buy themselves. 15 year old Daughter broke 3rd day, but lots of new clothes, youngest son 9 year old spent $44.00 over 7 days, oldest son 12 came home 7 days later had not spent a single dime. I don't know whether they learned anything or not but you can bet your last dollar, I SURE DID !
Bob Sr CEO Fieldtechs
Start them young.
EAC 6024
It's more my feeling like "what hods them back"? We're the world's leader, not the world's follower.....
When I would tell my dad that "Wally and Donny are going".......He would always say, "If Wally and Donny go over the falls in a barrel, are you going too ?"
Hard to say we are leading in this. Instead of a coin that lasts 30 years we use a paper buck that lasts 1.5.
I think the important number that Pew claims is 29% of Americans didn't use cash in a typical week last year. And I bet that number is rising fast, especially in big cities. Probably going to accelerate.
I remember an article I read probably back in the 70's where the author had made a trip thru Africa. He said no matter where he went They always knew and wanted two things from America. They all wanted a US dollar bill and a Coke.
Successful BST deals with mustangt and jesbroken. Now EVERYTHING is for sale.
I probably use cash about once every 2 months. The last time was to purchase some Girl Scout cookies.
More than US dollars, I remember people getting American Express Travelers Cheques when going abroad. I never really hear of people doing this these days.