Last Updated on February 24, 2022
A recent promo required the use of piggy banks as a visual metaphor of people donating to political campaigns. Though I haven’t shopped for a traditional piggy bank in quite a while — what I save, I save in a bank account — I didn’t think it would be that difficult to find one.
I was wrong.
I went to store after store. The most obvious choice, Walmart, which seems to have a little of everything, had nothing when it came to saving. Target had ceramic piggy banks about the size of a football, but they wanted ten bucks a piece for them. If you pay ten bucks for the piggy bank, what do you have left to actually put in it?
I went to Dollar General, a discount store, and they didn’t have them. I tried Big Lots, another discount store, and they didn’t have them, either.
The last place I looked, Dollar Tree, a discount store in which everything actually is one dollar in price, had a shelf of them. I bought eight of them, along with some spray paint to make them either blue or red.
During the painting process, one of the little piggies fell off of the hook I was using to suspend it and crashed into a dozen pieces. The pig was in the process of being painted red. Republicans can take this as a sheer accident that has nothing to do with any future races; Democrats will no doubt interpret this as a case of the pig deciding that suicide was preferable to being associated with the Grand Old Party. You can decide for yourself.
Maybe it’s a sad commentary on what our kids are being taught about the value of saving their money when piggy banks are almost nowhere to be found. Maybe someone brilliant has decided that offering them the chance to open their own bank account at a young age rather than dropping their change into a pig-shaped container is just as good, and this is what everyone’s doing instead.
Personally, though, I don’t think a piggy bank is such a bad idea to teach kids the value of saving money at an early age.
If, that is, you can locate one for the lesson.
Toys R Us? Did you try Amazon? Hobby Lobby (one to paint–I have one like this)
I had an awesome bank as a kid that was shaped like a book, or rather a diary. It was about the size of my hand (adult-hand, not kid-hand) and even had it’s own key. Very very cool.
My son has a pirate bank. I wonder what message that is sending? 😀
Mainly, I had to go with stores that were within relatively quick driving distance. Not sure if we have a Hobby Lobby, but I’m pretty sure there’s not one on this side of town if there is one in our area. Amazon wouldn’t have been an option because we needed it that afternoon.