Gonna Go Back In Time

A hundred bucks is a lot to spend on a toy for a kid. And it always has been.

It’s weird this three-figure ceiling has stayed in place for so many years. When I was a kid, the ne plus ultra of Christmas jackpots in my peer group was the G.I. Joe aircraft carrier U.S.S. Flagg. At seven and a half feet in length, it was the largest Joe toy ever made. It was insane. It cost over a hundred dollars.

We were rightly awed in those days by that colossal sum. More than .1Gs? For a toy? Insane! The height of extravagance! Where where would you even keep the thing, let alone play with it?

But a hundred simoleons in 1985 is more like $230 today. And shelling out a Benjamin for a toy in 2017 is the equivalent of spending $44 back in Breakfast Club money. I’m sure I got the occasional $44 dollar Christmas present. So why are we still so intimidated by a price tag bearing a third place value, even though it means so much less?

Maybe it’s because manufacturing costs have come down together with the buying power of a dollar? Maybe it’s a function of our most basic primitive “one, two, many” number sense? Maybe there’s a well-known and obvious explanation I’m just too lazy to Google right now?

Whatever, who cares? Not you, because we brought every iota of our dealmongering savvy to bear on these UL2272 certified hoverboards to get them sellable at under a hundy each. (Barely. Before shipping.)

Maybe by holding this price just under that hundred-dollar mark, we’ll get a few hover-curious non-enthusiasts to go “that looks like fun, I’ll try it.” Maybe we’ve put the self-balancing scooter inside a few grandparents’ per-kid Christmas budget. We hope so. And not just because we love selling out of stock. (Mainly because of that, but not just.)

Also because we love the mental image of going back in time to the holidays of our youth, confronting that lucky kid who scored the U.S.S. Flagg, and being all like “instead of a giant military playset, Mom got me a pair of two-wheeled self-balancing motorized scooters that run on technology so advanced it’s basically unfathomable to your Atari-age mind, and then with the funds left over, she gave me three passes to see any movie I want in the theater, plus a dollar in cash.”

It’s true youth is wasted on the young. But man, this dazzling high-tech future sometimes seems similarly squandered on us oldsters.