I’d really like to say that I joined Junior Achievement to learn about free enterprise and the U.S. economic system. At the time, though, I was more interested in learning about a girl.
It was the autumn of 1979, my junior year at Akron North High School, and I hadn’t fully considered the romantic possibilities of capitalism until I heard that a certain classmate — a total fox, according to the vernacular of the day — had recently joined JA. I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to network with this girl outside the classroom and impress her with my shrewd business savvy.
To carry off the subterfuge, I enlisted my friends Glenn and Joe into joining Junior Achievement, too. We converged one evening at the JA building on East Tallmadge Avenue near Home Avenue in North Akron, only to discover that organizational meetings had occurred a week or two earlier and that the teen-run companies already had formed.
We latecomers were wedged into a company called Gone Marbles whose signature product, virtually guaranteed to be a top seller in the 1980s, was a tabletop tic-tac-toe game. Why play a free game of tic-tac-toe with pencil and paper when you could pay for a homemade wood block topped with toy marbles?
That was a good question. We probably should have asked it.
As we settled into corporate life, it occurred to me that the girl who inspired me to join Junior Achievement was nowhere to be found. She had dropped out a week earlier and left me holding the bag (of marbles).
It wasn’t personal; it was only business. My friends and I stuck to the game plan.
Our company was made up of students from several Akron high schools, and we got along well, although we seemed to spend a lot of time debating popular music. I remember my associates Rita and Nay-Nay teaching us the words to Rapper’s Delight by the Sugarhill Gang: “I said a hip hop, hippie to the hippie, the hip, hip a hop, and you don’t stop, a rock it to the bang bang boogie, say, up jump the boogie to the rhythm of the boogie the beat.”
That was as good a business plan as any.
Our adult advisers, Tony, Bob and Dan, were a friendly, easygoing bunch from a local tire company. If they had any misgivings about our product, I’ve blocked them out. Our marble games were a lost cause.
With rare access to shop equipment, we cut blocks of wood into squares, carved tic-tac-toe patterns on top and drilled nine indentations to hold the marble game pieces. We then sanded the wooden blocks by hand, smoothing all the sharp edges so prospective players could avoid splinters or other painful injuries during strenuous games of tic-tac-toe.
We packaged the game boards and marbles in clear plastic bags, folded over the tops and stapled them shut. Then it was a simple matter of flooding the market with a revolutionary new product.
During a Junior Achievement trade fair at Rolling Acres Mall, a woman stopped at the Gone Marbles table to inspect the goods. She picked up a bagged game, shook it a little and asked innocently: “Where do you keep the marbles after the bag is open?”
The question shook our company to the core because we didn’t have an answer. There was no place to store loose marbles. The design was flawed! If only we had drilled a storage compartment in the side of the wood blocks.
Needless to say, we didn’t sell a lot of games that day — or ever. After we peddled a few to our reluctant families, there weren’t many takers.
We were desperate for revenue. During a company meeting, someone suggested that we add a second product. A couple of the girls owned knitting kits, so we somehow got talked into making pot holders from nylon strips.
Yes, we truly had gone marbles. The pot holders didn’t sell either.
Our stockholders wouldn’t get any dividends that year.
Mercifully, the company dissolved in the spring. During the annual awards banquet, IITYWYBO was named Junior Achievement Company of the Year. The name was short for “If I Tell You, Will You Buy One?”
Those kids were marketing geniuses. Their product was only a coat hanger.
Although our company was a failure, we had a lot of fun losing money and we still learned valuable lessons about business.
If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. If you build a tic-tac-toe game, though, the world will run away as fast as it can.
Copy editor Mark J. Price is author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.