Today I decided to go to the annual fair since it was free and you usually always have to pass by this area that has electronic games. In it you can play a wide variety of games like ski ball that reward you with tickets which you can then exchange for prizes such as toys and candy. As you can see here, they listed various electronic items with prizes such as video game consoles and an iPad.
I remember as a kid this was actually one way I learned financial literary skills and how sometimes items are grossly inflated to the point where you should find other places to get the item. My parents brought me to this place called Chuck E. Cheese where I would constantly save up my tickets to try and get a big prize at the end of the day. One day I went with another parent’s child and we decided to combine our tickets to get this toy paper airplane of sorts. That was a bad idea as he didn’t want to share after and so my dad just asked the employee how much another one costs in cash. From what I observed, it was something like $8.
That was a shocker because I was thinking how many quarters I had to spend to play the games in order to earn enough tickets to buy it with that route. It just made so much more sense in my mind where if I wanted that item I should find a way to earn money and just buy it that way instead. As a result, it made me so subconscious about ways to invest your time and money. In many ways, with the way the prize and rewards were priced it’s almost like I was spending a quarter to get ten cents back.
Even with this example today, on average you could win about twenty tickets per dollar. Do the math with like a 40,000 ticket item and that’s like $2000 to get that item. There is no way the regular retail cost of that item is that expensive. You might not think kids can pick up on things like this when it comes to money, but like in my example you may be surprised. Even for myself, I probably learned the most practical financial literacy skills through observations of scenarios like these. Start them young.