About to pay my barber, I dug into my pocket and pulled out my money clip. It was stuffed with a needlessly bulky collection of one-dollar bills. My barber said he could use singles, so he exchanged my haircut for a wad of bills, and I got a crisp $10 note in return as well.
While this bit of money laundering was going on, my barber quipped that our high-finance exchange was like Monopoly -- adding that the venerable Parker Brothers board game is now electronic. Players bank their stash using mag-stripe plastic cards, he said.
What's this? Monopoly has gone e-Monopoly? For a graying gamer like me, who would play Monopoly with traditional little wooden houses and hotels (even plastic ones) and lots of multi-colored paper Monopoly cash tucked under the Park Place and Boardwalk end of the board, this was nothing short of incredible.
Wincing to myself (those of you who regularly read my Editorials know I like antiques and old stuff), I was reminded how pervasive low-cost electronics has become. And profitable.
It turns out that board-game maker Hasbro is teamed with a company called Electronic Arts, an outfit that's now the world's largest third-party games publisher. Most of EA's billions of revenues are garnered from sports games.
Hasbro and EA's electronic versions of Monopoly now target a new and fast-growing business segment. Women and older players, not teenage video gamers, are prime in the sights of Hasbro and EA. This so-called casual market is big. The two companies hope to cash in on over $500 million this year alone, according to the Wall Street Journal.
One of the reasons for this is that compared to shoot-em-dead video games, Monopoly software is primitive. It should run on just about any platform, from a notebook to a well-endowed cell phone. What a cornucopia for developers!
Nonetheless, when kids played Monopoly before the electronic version was even a gleam in its inventor’s eyes, one of the things they learned was how to keep track of cash, and how to make change. For most of today's cashiers, that skill set seems to be a lost art. Electronic point-of-sale terminals have replaced cash registers, and kids who can’t add without a calculator usually man them. Thankfully the machines compute change accurately.
Leaving the barbershop, I neatly folded my $10 bill, tucking it into a corner of my wallet. Times have changed, haven't they? But, some things remain the same. I'm happy to have green folding money in my wallet. I’m also glad my barber still uses old-fashioned scissors and combs.
Stay resonant, until next time.
