It's not difficult to PIN down popularity of toy ATMs
By Ann Gerhart
Washington Post
WASHINGTON — Somewhere in China, frantic factory workers cannot make enough toy automatic teller machines for clamoring American children.
Washington Post
"I wish every kid in America could have an ATM," says Michael Searl, the onetime stockbroker who created the Youniverse ATM Machine, a highly evolved piggy bank that receives and dispenses real cold cash, not that fake play stuff. "Why wouldn't I want every kid to have one?"
The Youniverse ATM Machine receives and dispenses cash. Creator Michael Searl says his company "can't make them fast enough" to satisfy demand despite raising production from 50,000 to 2 million.
Tweens and beyond can insert the supplied ATM card into the silver machine, punch in their PIN, be greeted by name on the electronic display, peer into the pretend security camera and wait for that seminal capitalistic moment — when crisp bills miraculously appear, ripe for the plucking.
Unlike in a real ATM, a cash drawer opens in the toy ATM, allowing an avaricious child to grab every last cent and run. What do you want for $24.95? But the machine does automatically count coins.
The concept is so seductive that the Youniverse ATM is sold out all across the land. About 10,000 flew out of Toys R Us in four days.
When the machine made its debut on QVC and the Home Shopping Network, it sold out in three minutes.
On eBay, that cyber exemplar of supply and demand, the machine, with its tiny logos mimicking Visa, MasterCard and American Express, is selling for more than $70.
Searl's Summit Financial Products also makes a brightly colored toy armored car, but discontinued its low-tech piggy bank some time back.
He claims he was taken aback by the spike in demand this holiday season for a gizmo he has been making for three years.
"The first year we did only 50,000," he says. "Now, I guess we have done in the neighborhood of 2 million. We can't make them fast enough."
Betsy Taylor, president of the Center for the New American Dream, a Takoma Park, Md., group advocating responsible consumption, gets the toy ATM's appeal right away.
"Kids are bombarded with messages that celebrate and glorify money at every turn, whether it's '(Lifestyles) of the Rich and Famous' or 'Who Wants to Marry a (Multi-)Millionaire?' " she says. "It's all about money."
With credit card debt, personal bankruptcies and the national deficit at an all-time high, says Taylor, "this is one more message that you can get as much as you can as fast as you can. You can play Mom and Dad, and money just falls in your hand."
The ATM, marked for ages 8 and up, "is symbolically significant and highly valued — the money machine! It must have a very strong aspirational pull. Using an ATM is one of the things that grown-ups do in full view of kids that the kids have very little access to," says Juliet Schor, a Boston University professor who wrote "Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture."
"It's one part of consuming that kids aren't in on. They are full-fledged consumers, buying clothing, picking groceries, selecting toys. ... But they don't have entry into the real ATM."
Searl doesn't worry that he is helping create a generation of money-grubbing children.
"Look, they are learning about money whether we teach it to them or not," he says. "If nothing else, we are teaching them one simple concept: You gotta make money before you take money out."
Searl, 45, started his company 10 years ago to teach money management to youngsters. As a stockbroker, "we went from not making any money to making lots of it, and I had four kids who saw that. But I was terrible teaching them about it.
He manufactured an allowance kit, a plastic bank with three compartments, for savings, spending and investing, with a workbook and a cassette tape.
Serious, sensible business.
"We killed it years ago," Searl says.
"It just didn't do as well. It was too complicated."
