Baby’s first balance
Hasbro and Visa have decided that what your children really need is training in how to drive themselves deeply into debt. [link via BoingBoing]
As if credit card-related debt wasn’t a big enough problem in the U.S., Hasbro and Visa want to fuel the fire. Hasbro is launching a new edition of The Game of Life called Twists and Turns that will replace play money with a Visa-branded card. Matt Collins, Hasbro’s vice president of marketing, said of the switch, “When we started to design a completely new edition of the popular game, we knew it was also time to reflect the way people choose to pay and be paid – and replacing cash with Visa was an obvious choice.”
They also changed the goal of the game from accumulating the most money to earning the most “life points.” Supposedly this a combination of wealth and life experiences, but it’s not hard to see parallels between “life points” and the reward points and airlines miles offered by certain credit cards.
At a certain point, words fail. Our society legitimizes and legalizes certain forms of loan sharking, our banks deregulate, and credit card companies are allowed to act more and more thuggish with our accounts, and Hasbro decides it’s time for our kids to learn how to pay for everything with Visa. Not for the kids to learn when to charge and when to use cash, but for kids to learn to pay for everything with the tiny plastic card that can wind up getting their kneecaps broken.
Is there anybody out there who is not an employee of Hasbro or Visa (or Mastercard, for that matter) who thinks this is really a great idea?