Price Gouging

Hubby and I usu­ally catch up when I get home from teach­ing & in the morn­ing about all the hijinks & hilar­ity that went on while the other one of us was gone as some point dur­ing the day.  Today Mr. J’s reac­tion to The Tooth Fairy’s lat­est visit came up, because Mr. J lost a tooth the day before yesterday.

The story went some­thin’ like this…

“So, buddy did The Tooth Fairy come last night?”

“I don’t know”

“Well, why don’t you check?”

Mr. J runs to his room & checks.  It turns out that yes she had come, it had been sit­ting there ALL day. I assumed he had already checked, silly I know.  This is the kid would would for­get his head if it wasn’t attached to his body.  And I don’t even want to get into how we had planned on not doing The Tooth Fairy.  That we had talked about it, thought it unnec­es­sary.  But at school there was all this talk about how The Tooth Fairy comes to your house & gives you money or a prize.  There was even a week were The Tooth Fairy was part of learn­ing about clean­ing your teeth. I mean it was taught, so MOM IT HAS TO BE DONE!  RULES ARE RULES!  So the pres­sure was on.  We caved.

But Mr. J it turns out wasn’t happy with The Tooth Fairy. After check­ing his room he came back to Hubby.

“Well, now, this is just get­ting bor­ing now.”

That is just phe­nom­e­nal. Not only does my daugh­ter think clean­ing is bor­ing & because she’s a Princess & as a Princess she doesn’t DO bor­ing, now my son thinks get­ting money for doing pretty much NOTHING is boring.

My hus­band had the same thought I did.  It went some­thing along the lines of…I mean really kid, bor­ing? You didn’t DO any­thing to earn money or a prize or even a happy dance, you lost a tooth. You should be happy we let you con­tinue to sit at the table with us because it was the 2nd tooth you lost while eat­ing din­ner.  And I gotta say mak­ing it hard for oth­ers to fin­ish eat­ing after you spit your tooth across the table with blood & food.  Instead you got free money out of that deal, what about that could pos­si­bly be bor­ing on your end.  I would kill for a trade off of doing noth­ing & get­ting some extra cash.

Instead of say­ing this thought aloud to Mr. J, Hubby asked him what he meant by that, what was bor­ing exactly.

His response, “It was just a dol­lar, last time it was a dol­lar & the time before that.  I mean like now it should be 10 dol­lars. A dol­lar is just boring.”

Yep, TEN DOLLARS!  For nothing.

He tried to mark up his teeth & price gouge The Tooth Fairy because it’s just bor­ing to only get a dol­lar.  A dol­lar he didn’t even remem­ber to check for until he was reminded & now he wanted not 2, not 3, but 10 dol­lars!  He wants to earn money for noth­ing, price gouge & have it wait­ing for him whether or not he even remem­bers he has it.

And I thought to myself  while lis­ten­ing to Hubby talk about the whole event that if Mr. J isn’t a bud­ding cap­i­tal­ist I am not sure who is.  Hubby agreed & thought maybe we should have him help us fig­ure out ways to make money doing noth­ing. Except we’d like to keep all our teeth we are all outta our baby teeth at this point.

Tagged as: capitalist, kids, lost teeth, mr. j, price gouging, tooth fairy