Lessons from trading cards
The two large supermarket chains in our city have a regular system of enticing children with collectibles. For a set period of weeks, these are handed out when customers spend a certain amount. Over the years I noticed the two supermarkets never do their collectibles at the same time. As one hand out theirs, the competitor would stop their series and vice-versa. They seem to be two suitors, neatly organised to court the attention of children.
The latest round of collectibles is the tried-and-tested form of trading cards. This series consists of characters from popular animation or superhero movies. What I noticed, however, was that the distribution of these cards is not at all fair. The supposed rule was that, with every $30 of purchases, the customer will obtain one pack of cards. When I shop alone, the staff at the counter always give me one pack as per the rule. When grandparents go, they often get two packs. The day when my six year old came shopping with us, I was stupefied to see that he got not one, nor two, but seven packs in total! Initially, the staff had given him three - already two more than his lot. Instead of leaving, he stood there looking so polite and imploringly at the lady, she gave him another two. Just when I thought the lady had outdone herself, he lingered a little longer staring intently at the packs in her hand. She looked so torn that she gave him yet another two. Thus he received the blessing sevenfold. Truly, the staff handing out the cards are like the owner of the vineyard who gives his wages to his labourers, not according to their work, but according to his generosity.
These packs of cards, however many, we never give to our son without cause. We make him work for them by completing chores, doing his exercises or practising his piano. If he misbehaves, we would threaten to take them away. In this way, the trading cards act as a proxy for pocket money, and handy to us parents to use as reward and punishment. I believe that’s why I get involved the system in the first place. Despite the idea, however, our son would always get all the packs one way or another. There’s always something to reward him for, just like there’s always a reason to compliment any colleague at work.
The home quickly becomes messy because the entire set consists of 108 cards, and in the busy activity of collecting, the cards become scattered everywhere. The supermarket solves this problem by selling a companion folder. At first, I suspected the folder was the supermarket’s ploy to reap further profit from us, and we resisted the purchase until they came to discount. Alas, it turns out the folder was a trap more devious. For the cards are not in a miscellaneous set of 108, but cleverly organised into thirty-six triplets, one triplet per movie. Thus, instead of missing ten or twenty or thirty from completing the whole set, the folder is lined with groups just one short of completing one more triplet. In this manner, the folder constantly reminded my son that he is just one short of another set. Falling to such cunning, we frequented the supermarket again and again in the hope of filling that one extra triplet. Sometimes we fill the triplet, but more often than not, we bring another set closer to being just one short. (A little bit of mathematical reflection would reveal this must be the case.) From this I learnt that the best way to get people to behave is not to push them into doing something, but to paint a picture where they are just slightly behind completing a goal, and they will eagerly fill the gap themselves. Team leaders wanting to mobilise their staff should take note. Like the supermarket, they should break down a large, seemingly insurmountable goal into smaller ones that always look like they are about to complete.
Whether it is because we don’t buy enough groceries, or whether we shop alone too often without our children, we never seem to collect fast enough. To complete his set, our son would take his spare cards and trade them with other children at school. This greatly facilitated his collection and the folder was rapidly filled. How he succeeded in this clandestine activity, I do not know, for children are not supposed to bring the cards to school.
Observing the experience, I am once again confirmed in a belief I always held. Some economists say that the truth of our world is give-and-take, some scientists say it is survival of the fittest, some philosophers say it is will-to-power. What I grasped is that none of these is the deepest truth of our world. The deepest truth of our world is that of free grace. For my son will work and trade, but whence will he get the cards if they were not freely given to him in the first place? Adults are preoccupied with perceptions of fairness or unfairness, and we believe we earn what we worked hard to deserve, but are we not like children with their cards, working for what was ultimately not ours to begin with? Should one child complain of unfairness if their friends have more cards than they? If children’s cards are a proxy for money, then our money is a grown-up version of trading cards. Whether we worked for them or not, it is but a thin veil to see that cards and money alike in their origin came to us from a source outside of us - no one gave birth to themselves.
All of us, from the first day of our birth, are helpless babes and brought up by free grace of our parents. When we have children of our own, we learn to give the same free grace which we once received as a child. When we become old and decrepit, we once more become recipients of free grace from those who love. Is not life a continuing cycle of free grace? I can imagine a world where’s no war, but I cannot imagine a world without the unmerited laborious love of parents in the early years. I can imagine a world without markets, but not a world without the free sharing of knowledge and arts within a community. And if our human world can be without one but not the other, then is it not correct to say that grace is the essential truth of our world, and aspects like give-and-take, warfare and power, are but accidental feature?
Free grace, so deeply woven into the fabric of our world, has escaped the attention of thinkers and philosophers throughout the ages. Like the air we breathe, it is not noticed until lost or consciously thought about.
Unfortunately, the supermarket stopped handing out the cards before we could complete the set. We had all the cards but one. On hearing, one of our friends was kind enough to consult a local network of parents sharing cards for their children. She found someone with the missing card and passed it to us for free, which we in turn, passed to our son. From parent to parent to parent to child. That too, is a gift of human grace.