The marketers have a term for it: KGOY -- "Kids growing older younger." The ATM is a real KGOY toy, says Juliet B. Schor, a Boston University professor who wrote "Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture."
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 Schor. "It's one part of consuming that kids aren't in on. They are full-fledged consumers, buying clothing, picking groceries, selecting toys. They go to the spa and get their nails done. But they don't have entry into the real ATM."
"We can't make them fast enough," says Michael Searl of his ATM for kids.
(Jay Premack -- The Washington Post)
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Her own daughter wants one, badly.
When Schor showed Sulakshana, 9, an online picture of the Youniverse ATM, her daughter said in an e-mail that she wanted one "because it looks cool. It looks like a real ATM and real ATMs are cool. Real ATMs are amazing because you can put a card in and get money anywhere there's an 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. My daughter was 10, and she kept saying, 'Can I have some money?' And I said, 'Ashley, what are you going to do some day when I'm not around?' And she said, 'I'll just marry a rich husband,' and I said, 'Oooo, this is not good.' "
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."
A decade of instant gratification and luxury fever later, tweener life is faster, buzzier, lit up, and ATM banking has moved right into the bedroom, along with the PC, the MP3, the DVDs. "Who knows, perhaps this is how Donald Trump started out," states the press kit for the Youniverse ATM. "You may even be raising the next Apprentice."
Like we need any more of those.
