Pseudo-Currencies in Elementary School

Remembering the things we bought and traded at a young age

By: Carter Starkey

It’s the year 2009, and you walk into an ordinary elementary school. You walk past art rooms with finger-painted turkeys plastered on the walls, math rooms where kids are being introduced to the dubious concepts of algebra and arithmetic, and find that many of the kids are having recess. Suddenly, you stumble upon a room of excited children trading chestnut-sized plastic toys called Bakugan. When one touches a specific surface, it pops out of its spherical shape, slightly resembling a dragon or a snake. Looking back, it is a bit of a lackluster trick. Nevertheless, these things have immense value within the walls of an elementary school.

Out on the playground, you notice that kids are huddled in groups. You may see a dollar bill or two being passed around and countless wrists adorned with Sillybandz: a whole underground market of trading them back and forth. At the school store, you find lines of students waiting eagerly to buy eraser tops shaped like farm animals with their allowances. Not only did these things have value, but they acted as a language for us to explore our wants and desires from a young age.

Who knows why these small, underground markets pop up or why these items become pseudo-currencies for kids who don’t even know that word. Before any of this, kids traded snack cakes at lunch tables. Maybe it’s in our nature to turn to our neighbor, see the cool stuff they have, and make some of our very first economic decisions in order to get something cool of our own. Maybe it was the corporations’ doing, designing things like toys and cards to be traded amongst groups of friends. 

In the year 2022, there is no telling exactly why this phenomenon occurs. Instead, we can be thankful for some of our earliest obsessions and look back at them with the fondness they deserve.