Irregular Payments

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It is with a heavy heart that I read of Parker Brothers engaging in a little short sighted opportunism with it’s most memorable game, Monopoly by trading in their Monopoly money for a Debit Visa. All to get a pitiful stack of cash from VISA - who have incidentally pulled of an insanely savvy marketing move here for what probably cost them what amounts to their fee revenue for this morning. (OK, it doesn’t specifically say Visa ponied up some money for their branding to appear, but you know they did…)

Future Monopoly players (if any future players bother taking up playing after this bastardization of the game) will get the exquisite pleasure of, well, swiping their VISA-brand debit card through a VISA-brand card reader. Versus stacking up those big piles of multiple denominations of (non)dollars when you were doing well. Or excitedly leaving them in a jumbled mess when you were doing really well. Or dejectedly watching those stacks getting smaller and smaller, when you weren’t. Or even trying to, oh, let’s say, accidentally grabbing a couple 500s rather than 100s when you passed GO (what, I can’t be the only player ever to have pulled that, am I? ;)).

What really bothers me is a main lesson learned through playing Monopoly - the pain of paying in cold hard cash - is going away. It hurts to pay $1,500 when you stumble across a hotel on Park Avenue - especially when you only have $1,542 and have to scrounge through all those $5s to pay the bill. What used to be a big stack of bills is now a couple $20s and a couple $1s. Even when you have thousands, it’s painful, because you realize that a few more unlucky rolls, and what was a large bankroll will be gone. Only now, it’s just a smaller number on the VISA-branded card reader.

Monopoly life seems a little less intimate all of a sudden… and that, I think, is a lot of the problem with real life as far as money is concerned. We’ve become disconnected from it - it’s just a number on a piece of paper or up on the screen in front of us, an even greater abstraction than cash of the effort gone into obtaining it. There is no pain involved in spending - swipe and walk away, taking your new shiny doodad with you. It sure makes it awfully easy to spend spend spend. VISA’d appreciate if you did it more, apparently, and would like to ease the transition into good consumers for you young ones…

Oh, sure, there are other lessons to be learned from playing Monopoly, from the importance of location, location, location in business to the randomness of events in life to the… well, that’s about it. Much else about the game, as far as life lessons are concerned, are not lessons I’d like to pass on: Life as a zero sum game. Winning means taking everything belonging to everyone else. Profit comes by taking from others. A little bribe speeds up the legal system. The rich eventually wear everyone else down.

Nevertheless, there is something visceral about playing with real (non)money. Even a numbers geek like myself won’t get too excited by a big (or tiny) number on the ol’ VISA-branded card reader. The ebbs and flows of that pile o’ cash made what is really a fairly boring game into something you could eagerly spend 4 hours on on a lazy Saturday afternoon.

RIP Monopoly…

Tagged:
 » Monopoly, Hasbro, Parker Brothers, VISA, opportunism, games, profit, money, cash, debit card, RIP

I’m fairly oblivious to the financial news of the day, but I happened to stumble across Bank of America revealing their earning $18.23 billion in revenue in the second quarter yesterday.

In the same article, this little tidbit stuck out at me:

… the bank said fee income rose 38 percent to $9.6 billion …

Anybody besides me see anything shocking there? Almost 53% of Bank of America’s revenue is coming, not from interest like I would expect, but from bank fees! (Almost $10 billion in bank fees! My, we are busy consumers, aren’t we? Of course, I wouldn’t expect any less from the parent company of MBNA, because, as you cretainly know by now, MBNA sucks… ;))

Tagged:
 » mbna, bank of america, boa, mbna sucks, credit cards, credit, bank fees

Something free can be a wondrous thing. I love getting something I want without having to spend a single red cent. But for some, there is a problem with free. That problem: the lack of appreciation for that which costs you nothing.

Last weekend, the wife and I dropped our son off at my parents, tossed a few things in a duffel bag, jumped in the car, and drove a few hours in search of a couple days worth of live music. It’s been a bit since we’ve spent some quality time with each other away from the kiddo for more than a few hours, much less a couple days. And it’d been even longer since we caught some really good live music, definately one of our favorite things. So, needless to say we were looking forward to it. Let me just say up front, the festival didn’t let us down. Astoundingly good musicians, great location, tasty (and cheap) food & drink. (Oh, sure, maybe it was a little warm, but we are in the Midwest and it is July, after all - and it didn’t feel that hot to either of us.) To top it off, a wonderful admission price: free!

It was interesting observing my fellow festival goers. Early in the day, the turnout was pretty light, maybe 3-4,000. I did mention that it was fairly warm; South Dakotans obviously are wimps chose to avoid the hottest part of the day and stayed home until later. Those that did venture out were definitely there for the music and musicians, and treated them with the reverence that a good music freak should.

As the day progressed (and cooled), the bigger acts came up and, of course, the festival grounds got a bit more crowded. By the time the final few acts took to the stage (the inimitable zydeco of Buckwheat Zydeco and the, well, transcendental jazz of Medeski, Martin, & Woods), I’d guess a good 40-50,000 people were milling about.

And this is when the problem with free makes its appearance. I’ve never been to a show with anywhere near the number of people just chatting away on their cellphones. Or holding loud conversations with their five friends (and getting louder to be heard over the music that we were presumably there to hear). Or just aimlessly wandering around (and always seeming to need to make a stop and ponder life in our line of view to the stage). Oh, sure, just about any show I’ve ever been to has a few examples of any of these. But we were absolutely surrounded by one after another after another after another… of these people.

Had there been a reasonable price for admission, most of these people would have either not shown up at all (most likely), or at least would have not been as oblivious to the music before them. But since the music was offered up for free, it was apparently just a big background-noise-for-my-night-out to many in attendance. I’m generally about the most laissez-faire guy you’d ever know, but more than once I fought the impulse of grabbing some inconsiderate moron’s cell phone and tossing it into the river.

(Notwithstanding the last few paragraphs: Medeski, Martin, & Woods. Absolutely incredible! If you ever get the chance to partake, do so… Buckwheat certainly puts on a hellacious show, but MMW, all I can say is Wow!)

Tagged:
 » free, lack of appreciation, live music, music, Buckwheat Zydeco, Medeski, Martin, & Woods