Imagine living in a neighborhood where everyone is rich, including you. Would you spend your money on things you cared about and genuinely liked, or would you just try to outdo the neighbors and buy things to make you look rich?

In this story, a store employee tells us about two families. One is genuinely nice and buys their sweet daughter thoughtful yet expensive gifts. The other family, well, they do things differently.

Keep reading for all the details.

You want to one-up your friendly neighbour? Alrighty then.

A few years ago, I used to work at a toy store. The store mainly focused on high-priced and European-made toys.

One of our big sellers in the toy store is Sylvanian Families (SF). They’re basically little animal figures that you can buy accessories and houses and stuff for them. Think of them as animal doll houses. They’re from Europe and they can be pretty expensive.

The store is in an area where the families have a HIGH disposable income. As in quite often you see Mercedes, Porsches BMWs, Audi’s and Ferrari’s inhabiting the parking spaces.

Being spoiled doesn’t necessary mean acting entitled.

Well, as you’d expect, with high disposable income comes that real ‘Keeping Up With The Joneses’ mentality. One-upping is rife in this area. Toys are no exception.

SF are hot items for parents to use as a way to determine their childs social status, so the bigger the collection, the bigger their kid is in the rich fish pool.

I know the family with the biggest SF collection belongs to a little girl, about 7, whose mother works for the Japanese embassy. The father is a lecturer. So a big-money family.

This family, I’ll call the Jays, are the most kind and sweet-hearted family in existence. They pay top dollar for their little daughter and she is so sweet and humble when she wants to chat with us, its a delight when they shop here.

But some people only care about keeping up with the Joneses, or in this case, Jays.

We also know that their neighbours are the exact opposite. I don’t know what the husband does, but the wife I’m sure is a moocher. Think Peggy Bundy from Married With Children. In fact, that’s what I’ll call this mother.

Whatever the Jays daughter had, Peggy’s 8-year old tyrant had to have one more or better quality. Actually whatever the Jays have, she demands to do one better.

Peggy is honestly the type that if Mrs. Jay came down with a cold, she’d run from her house in the dead of winter, straight into the hospital’s ICU and pencil roll over the contagious patients and drink from their catheter waste containers and colostomy bags in the hopes she’d contract pneumonia.

Peggy was on a mission!

Anyway, Peggy must’ve heard that the Jays daughter was given some SF as a birthday present (they did, they spent about $90). This was about a week before Peggy’s arrival to settle the score.

Peggy flew into the store like a misguided menopausal missile, zooming across the western section of the store before detonating in the upper atmosphere that is the central part of the store with a velociraptor-like shriek.

Peggy: “WHERE ARE THE SYLVANIAN FAMILIES?”

Me: “In the eastern section of the store.”

I point to a pyramid of SF toys, most of them recent arrivals and she may as well have been the Alien Queen finding Ellen Ripley. She power marched over to the pyramid and scanned each and every one.

She insisted on assistance.

She snapped her fingers at me.

Peggy: “YOU! HERE! NOW!”

Not a lot of things get up my goat, but finger-snapping at me like I’m a dog is definitely one of them. I suck it up and see what she wants to buy. I know she’s buying and buying big.

Me: “Found something you like?”

It wasn’t so much about what she did or did not like. She wanted to outdo the Jays.

Peggy: “How much did the Jays spend on their daughter’s SF?”

Me: “I dunno. Ninety bucks.”

You can hear the Jeopardy theme go in her head as she’s working out how to top ninety quid on a SF present.

Peggy: “Well then, my son is turning 9 in a month and I want HIS collection to be better than Jays daughter’s collection!”

Me: “Okay.”

This was the perfect opportunity to upsell Peggy.

This was a Friday and is generally one of our days where head office demands that we reach a high sales target. We had a slow day up until this point and unless we had a miracle moneybag drop on us from on high, we were NOT going to reach close to that day’s budget.

It’s company policy to recommend toys to parents, but not make it an effort to deliberately gouge them. A lot of the high-income earners in the area could be a real scrooge and didn’t take kindly to us trying to proverbially cut open the bottoms of their wallets.

I also wanted to make budget to finish the week on a high so I decided to take advantage of Peggy’s one-upmanship game. Her 8-year old’s status meant everything to her, so I gambled on gouging her wallet to plump up my budget and her not noticing.

How big is her budget? Let’s find out.

Peggy: “Let’s see…ninety dollars…ninety dollars…”

Me: “Ma’am, allow me to show you some of the SF toys I know the Jays DON’T have.”

Peggy immediately feasted her attention on to me as I pointed the new releases. Some of them I knew had been bought by the Jays but hey, a little white lie every now and then never hurt, right?

I assumed she was going to go for a hundred dollar purchase but no, I was wrong. She snapped up Families, their accesories, houses, shops, schools. All the new releases, even bought multiples of some of the smaller packs when I suggested some the packs work better when you have doubles of them.

Jesus had left the $100 dollar limit server long ago.

She keeps on going!

Peggy keeps piling up the trolley. At this point, she’s not even bothering to look at them. She’s not even listening to me. If its SF, it’s goes into the trolley. She’s gone into an auto-pilot frenzy.

Peggy’s eroded so much of the pyramid that she discovers what we’ve been using to form the pyramid shape. The SF Windmill Houses. Oh boy. $250 for one of these.

SHE TAKES TWO.

Our once great pyramid has been ravaged by a Category 5 Hurricane Peggy. We all thought the Sphinx of Giza’s nose getting blown off was a disaster, the state of our SF pyramid was a catastrophe.

Will she really buy all of that? Time to find out!

By this point, I am hoping she buys all she has grabbed because it would be a royal pain to put the pyramid back together.

I ring all the toys up. It’s $890.

I tell her the amount and Peggy huffs and steams up like a busted gasket.

Peggy: “NO. THAT’S NOT GOOD ENOUGH.”

Was it really a contest?

She marches back to the pyramid, takes another SF accessory pack and has me ring that up as well. It’s over $900.

The beast is fed.

Peggy: “$90? Try $900! I win!”

Against J’s daughter, maybe I can see the logic in that.

But it’s not over yet!

But in terms of outright spending, she got beaten a month later. A hoity-toity from the French embassy bought just over a grand and a half of SF and dollhouses. They were much nicer than Peggy as well.

As for my budget, the $900 injection went a long way to clearing it. Do I regret gouging Peggy’s finances? Nope. Did her husband’s? Yes.

He carted one of the windmills and a whole pile of them back to the store on the following Monday and furiously demanded a refund, which we didn’t do unless there was a fault or breakage on our end.

I didn’t work that day, but one of the managers I hated did, so her having to deal with that inferno made it all the more sweeter.

Peggy’s poor husband, both literally and figuratively! I’m sure the Jays don’t even know she’s competing with them. They’re just buying the toys their daughter wants. I wouldn’t be surprised if Peggy’s son doesn’t even like these toys.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

I thought this might be the case! These are really cute toys.

Same!

I hope this person is wrong about the Jays’ daughter. I’m more picturing Peggy’s kid not even playing with the toys.

This is very true!

Keeping up with the Joneses is pointless.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a rude customer who got exactly what they wanted in their pizza.