Charmander. Pikachu. He can do 40 damage.
If you don’t have kids, you probably don’t have the slightest idea what I’m babbling about. If, on the other hand, you’re like me and millions of other American parents, you realize that I’m speaking in “Pokémónese” (for lack of a better term).
For us parents with pre-teens, the past six months have been a living nightmare. One of the national burger chains has been giving out Pokémón™ (my kids tell me the word is a Japanese contraction of the English phrase, pocket monster, although nobody over 10 seems be able to verify that pearl of wisdom) toys since November and it seems like we eat there at least 20 times a week. An avalanche of Pokémón™ products has flooded the market, and it seems like our kids now own most of them.
We even took our three youngest children to see the Pokémón™ movie the day it came out -- 7 bucks a ticket, which entitled you to see what is, without a doubt, the single worst film I’ve ever seen in my life. I think the movie distributors realized this, too, because they gave everyone who bought a ticket a consolation prize: a Pokémón™ trading card. What a deal!
| These boys and girls want to trade things, to make deals. They’re not afraid to make cold calls -- going up to total strangers, interrupting them in mid-onion ring, and beginning a rapid negotiating process that, with any luck, will result in them getting the particular toy or trading card they’ve been coveting for at least, say, five minutes. |
Speaking of trading cards, we now have literally thousands of them, which my kids seem to devote their every waking hour to trading. They come in packs, not unlike bubble gum baseball cards did when I was a kid, and they even have catalogs suggesting the worth of specific individual cards. Kids collect them like stamps, with the main difference being that stamp collecting back then was limited to a small segment of the juvenile population. Pokémón™ collecting has gone mainstream.
I thought I was going to go insane.
Then one evening, while sitting in a loud, noisy burger joint with my wife and a few dozen other frazzled parents with screaming kids, I had an epiphany.
It was like suddenly seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I started tuning in to what was going on in this building full of grade school kids, and what I saw was the future of American commerce -- and that future was bright.
It suddenly dawned on me that we’re creating a generation of sales men and women, and they’re good at what they’re doing. My generation wanted to save the world and wound up, instead, building careers in government and presiding over the demise of public education throughout much of the country.
These boys and girls want to trade things, to make deals. They’re not afraid to make cold calls -- going up to total strangers, interrupting them in mid-onion ring, and beginning a rapid negotiating process that, with any luck, will result in them getting the particular toy or trading card they’ve been coveting for at least, say, five minutes. They’re not afraid to ask for the sale, to close the deal. They’re willing to be flexible, within limits, in order to bring the deal to fruition.
As I looked around at this group of screaming kids, I had a smile on my face as I realized that I would love to have any one of these kids work for me once they get out of college in another 10-12 years.
So next time you see a group of kids yapping excitedly about Pokémón™, ignore the words (which don’t make much sense, anyway) and focus, instead, on what’s really going on -- good old American commerce, pure and simple.
Oh, and while you’re at it, take a pass on the movie.
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