An American Lion

Let me be one voice of reason here:

A new payment option for anyone without a credit card or a debit card, no matter how young, has just become available. It’s initially offered by FooPets and Puzzle Pirates, online game companies that are business partners of Kwedit.com, a start-up based in Mountain View, Calif.

Minors as well as adults can buy items in the games with a “Kwedit Promise,” which can be paid off later in a number of ways — with a credit or debit card, for example, or with cash sent in a mailer that Kwedit supplies.

But here’s an entirely new payment option: A user can print out a barcode and head to a 7-Eleven store, which will accept cash, scan the code and notify Kwedit that payment has been made. In the next three months, a Kwedit logo will join those for credit cards and other payment methods on the doors of all 7-Elevens, a company spokesman says.

As game purveyors, Kwedit’s current partners sell virtual goods whose marginal cost is virtually zero, so there’s no risk of real financial loss if the promise is not repaid. But by offering Kwedit’s service, the game publishers capitalize on the most frictionless form of sales: buy now, pay later.

At FooPets, users “adopt” lifelike digitally animated pets and then buy virtual goods for them, including food, beds and chew toys. The site’s core demographic is 12- to 14-year-old girls, said Scott Sorochak, a co-founder of FooMojo, which operates the site. The company says that FooPets has one million active members and that it is signing up 20,000 to 25,000 new members daily.

“Kwedit is the first payment system we’ve used that doesn’t require getting a parent involved,” Mr. Sorochak said.

Now an eighth grader, on her own, can use a Kwedit Promise to buy a virtual 40-pound bag of Purina Puppy Chow. The chow exists only as a photograph of a Purina package, but FooPets instructs its users that the care and feeding of the digital pets they’ve adopted should be regarded as a serious matter. “Your FooPet is a real creature that lives online,” the company’s Web site says.

In this day and age, I can’t think of any good that can come out of this. As soon as you give a minor the tool they need to escape scrutiny, they will use it. As soon as they figure out how to take money from a 13 year-old, then they’re going to take a lot of money from 13 year-olds. And, as soon as parents see this sort of thing for what it is, they’ll protest, and they’ll figure out how to get it banned. I don’t want to be bothered with this on the news; if it sounds like a bad idea up front, then the inevitable evening news story about this a month from now is really going to annoy me. And I don’t even watch the evening news anymore. I’ve outsmarted the news; I know what’s going to be on before they do.

One of the few things parents can control is what their children buy online; if you take that away, look for all kinds of unethical things to happen. Yes, I do realize that there are definitely some upsides to this sort of thing, but the downsides? The downsides are embodied in the idea that a parent won’t know what their 13 year-old is buying. How do you get your money back if junior blows a few hundred bucks this way? Joe Sixpack, be prepared to see your kids spend all your grocery money on virtual scratching posts for a kitty that doesn’t exist.

Isn’t that how we make money in this country now? By providing an expensive time-waster so that young people can spend all of their money on intangibles that don’t actually exist? And they wonder why we’re absolutely screwed as a society.

As the man once said, we are amusing ourselves to death.