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Pricey Games: Moms Don't Play
Isaiah Thompson, 7, shops at CD Game Exchange in Northwest with mom CaShawn and sister Taahira.
(By Lucian Perkins -- The Washington Post)
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"What kind of hockey game?" you ask her.
"There's more than one?" she asks.
You nod.
She groans.
Nearby, Jayne Lytel, a 50-year-old mother of two boys, is waiting for her husband, David, who's in line buying games. For Christmas, Jayne and David got a GameBoy for Lucas, 8, and a Leapster L-Max, the pre-GameBoy, for Leo, 6. She's calculating the dollars: "The GameBoy was $90, the Leapster was $90, then you have to buy the charger and that's another $40. So I've probably spent" -- she's adding in the games her husband just bought -- "somewhere around $400."
Lytel is in an entirely different category from many moms, though. She's a professional Web manager and is into e-shopping for her boys' games. "I spend hours on the Net trying to find the best prices and trying to find something that's in stock. . . . Sometimes I use PriceGrabber or one of those meta-search engines," she says. Just because Lytel knows what she's doing doesn't mean she likes it, though. "This can all be very frustrating."
Thompson, Isaiah's mom, tries to keep up. Gaming is her 7-year-old's favorite thing in the world to do -- "and that's not an understatement," she says. He gets on her computer and plays free games on Disney.com, she adds, and sits in front of the 32-inch TV to play on his PlayStation 2.
Finally, after 30 minutes or so at CD Game Exchange, after a lot of finger-pointing and tiptoeing, Isaiah has made his choices: a Spider-Man 2 game for $15 and a Fantastic Four game for $25.
"It's 25 plus 15. You do the math -- 5 plus 5 is what?" asks Thompson, kneeling beside Isaiah, stacking the Spider-Man game atop the Fantastic Four game. "Put the zero down and move it to the what place? The tens place. One plus 2 is what?"
"Three," says Isaiah.
"Three plus one is. . . ."
Isaiah pauses. "Three plus one . . . is four," he says.
"Four and zero is what? How many dollars? Forty dollars," says Thompson, taking dollar bills out of her wallet. "I'm gonna loan you $8, and you get two games. How about that?"
"Yay!" screams little Isaiah, beaming.
