Over-Pricing & Hoarding…

Hi All,

I abhor this money mongering. Kids don’t have the money, parents do. Why should my child be deprived because I didn’t get to Wal-Mart in time to pick it up for $20.00 because I was working? In case you don’t have kids, or your kids are not of gaming age, the biggest game at the moment in toys is ‘Skylanders.’ I believe its popularity is in large part due to the collectibility of the characters. Kids get to ‘interact’ with the characters outside of the game as well as within the game. It inspires imagination. The stickers, trading cards and online codes are also very nice bonuses. Activision, the company from which this ingenious invention of this particular gaming platform came, did not foresee its inevitable popularity. There is a ‘shortage’ of characters. This shortage is, in part, due to these aforementioned money-mongers. eBay is horrible for this type of exploitation. It makes great, affordable, hard-to-find games and toys all that harder to find as affordable because certain money grubbers go into the stores, grab all that they can get their hands on, and then sell them for exorbitant amounts on eBay. This is not the first item to have had this phenomenon: Monster High dolls; Tickle Me Elmo; certain exclusive Nintendo games, the most recent of which being ‘Skyward Sword‘ with the exclusive ‘gold’ Wii-mote are just a few examples of this.

It makes me want to cry because it is not the ‘Big Bad Corporations’ who are the villain here – it is the regular Joe Blow that gets it in his head to make a few extra bucks. Who does it ultimately hurt? The kids who didn’t get their prized toy from ‘Santa,’ or for their birthday or other special occasion because their hard-working parents couldn’t get to the store before these greedy gussies. Just how commercialized has our society become? How much has consumerism become a priority? How did we let it get this far?

Of course the money being given doesn’t end up in the ‘Big Bad Corporation’s’ already deep pockets, but the average parent doesn’t usually have deep pockets either, and thus feels extremely bad for not being able to give their child something that should otherwise be affordable. I am one such parent. It’s all well and good to try to teach our children not to fall into the vices of ‘keeping up with the "Jones"’ or such, but when you’re the only kid in school who doesn’t have [insert newest toy craze here] then there are bound to be problems.

I would love to strike up a conversation here, so I am turning off the forced ‘private’ notes for this entry – although since I dislike anonymity I am keeping them with signatures. Of course as always with my entries, before I decided to go [Friends Only] for the majority of my diary, you can leave your note as [p], but I really do want to create more of a dialogue situation here since I feel this is a sore subject for many of us parents who are struggling to balance between providing for our children’s basic necessities of life, and providing for their growth into a well adjusted person of our society.

That’s all she wrote…
♥~K.