Word: toying
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...members of the Toy Manufacturers of America, which accounts for 90% of all the toys sold in the U.S., are expecting retail sales this year of $12.5 billion, up from $10.4 billion in 1983. It will be a "super year by a comfortable margin," says David Leibowitz, a toy-industry analyst for American Securities in New York City. New Jersey-based Toys "R" Us, America's largest seller of playthings (1983 sales: $1.32 billion), expects a sales Increase of about...
...popular items, Cabbage Patch dolls and Trivial Pursuit, both introduced ast year, are no longer simply hot-selling toys. They have now become American social milestones. Says Thomas Kully, a toy-industry watcher at the investment firm of William Blair & Co. of Chicago: 'Those two products are absolutely the biggest the industry has ever seen." Shipments of Cabbage Patch Kids and ancillary licensed products, including a board game, storybooks, decals and patches, will reach $1 billion in 1984. More than a year after they appeared and despite the fact hat Coleco, their manufacturer, does not even advertise them...
...brisk toy and board-game sales were set up, in part, by the decline and fall of the video game. Capricious young people rapidly cooled toward them in the fall of 1983, and retailers were stuck with huge oversupplies. At the same time, stores last Christmas were caught short of such traditional items as dolls, trucks and board games. Video-game retail sales this year are off sharply again, down 56% during the first nine months vs. the same period in 1983. Fueled partly by money that had previously been spent on expensive video games, sales of other kinds...
...Toy marketeers seem to have guessed right in determining what would sell. Fisher-Price, the toymaking subsidiary of Quaker Oats, teamed up with Kodak to produce a new child's camera that sells for $25 to $44. In its viewfinder is an indicator that shows a red flag if the child is holding the camera crooked. Fisher-Price has long made a play camera, but the one this year was its first foray into the real thing, and it is selling well...
...musicians than any stereotype image of computer nerds. By day, they met for discussions and debates that included a face-off between Bonn Parker, a computer-crime expert, and John Draper, the legendary "Cap'n Crunch," who developed a system for making free phone calls by using the toy whistle from a breakfast-cereal box to imitate the tone used by AT&T for long-distance calls. At night the hackers clustered around a dazzling array of computer hardware that beeped and glowed until 4 o'clock each morning...