By Michael Sansolo
A while back, small sign in a quick serve restaurant caught my eye. It read, “If you fear change, leave it here.” It was, of course, a tip jar.
Both creative and insightful I thought, and an enterprising way to get some gratuities. Which has to be a challenge these days, when so few people seem to have spare change.
There was a recent article in Popular Mechanics that also focused on change – in both its meanings. It detailed how Hasbro is eliminating paper money from the board game Monopoly and switching instead to an app that will replace the role of the banker.
The change in Monopoly might not shake the world in the same way investigations into monopolistic behavior by Google or Meta might, but this one still hit me.
I have to believe a lot of you, like me, spent many youthful hours playing Monopoly. Frequently I did so with my older sister who is a math whiz and made certain I never won a single game. But I did get a regular turn at being the banker, which I have to believe helped me and a lot of kids practice math and learn a little bit about money without even realizing it.
We learned how to make change. A skill that many young people seem to have lost, because they have almost no day-to-day experience with cash or coins. And now, it seems, young people won’t even have the opportunity to learn it playing Monopoly. As in almost all things, there will be an app for that.
I get it. Things change. Whether we like it or not, it’s the new reality.
For years now, students have learned math differently thanks to the ubiquitous presence of calculators. The skills I learned running a cash register in the 1960s are as unimportant today as when I used a slide rule in my college chemistry class.
This all is a reminder of the realities that retailers face going forward. Cash drawers eventually are going to become irrelevant. Even if communities forbid businesses from going cashless, it won’t matter – most people will go cashless. In addition, it appears that the retail industry’s problems with transaction fees on card purchases aren’t going to go away anytime soon.
Now more than a century old, Monopoly’s rules and conditions are changing to keep up with the times. Just like retailers have to keep up with the times. It is inevitable.
But I think I would miss counting cash as the banker next time I play Monopoly. So it is a good thing that I have an old version of the game stashed away. For me, at least, for the time being, it will be just like old times.
And next time I’m worried about change, I know just the restaurant to visit.
Michael Sansolo can be reached via email at [email protected].
His book, “THE BIG PICTURE: Essential Business Lessons From The Movies,” co-authored with Kevin Coupe, is available here.
And, his book “Business Rules!” is available from Amazon here.
The post Sansolo Speaks: Keep The Change appeared first on MNB.
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