Totally Candy Crushing The Math

I work at a grocery store. Last week, I was stocking the candy aisle, and a group of four young girls, between the ages of, I’d guess, five and nine, were picking out candy.

From listening to them, they had around $30 and were trying to figure out the maximum amount of candy they could get. Which was a lot, because most of our smaller candies that weren’t, like, fancy-chocolate type things, averaged about 75 cents, and we have a lot of weird, childish, gimmicky candy too.

For the duration of roughly half an hour, these girls were looking at the candy, comparing it, and switching it out if they found something else. They were very sweet and polite and were doing their best to stay out of everyone’s way, although clearly having fun.

At one point, I’d taken a quick break, and come back to see the girls sitting to one side of the aisle, candy spread on the ground around them. As I approached, one of the girls noticed me, and they quickly tried to get out of my way. By frantically trying to pick up the twenty-something pieces of candy on the ground. It was honestly really funny, as they were dropping about half of what they tried to pick up, just awkwardly piling it in their little arms. After a few seconds, I offered to get them a basket, and the older girl looked a little sheepish as she looked at the candy still on the floor, before she thanked me and agreed.

They were also doing the math completely on-the-fly. I never saw any of them pull out a calculator, and they didn’t ring anything up until they were almost finished, so they weren’t ringing and voiding a bunch of stuff to figure it out, just doing it in their heads and helping each other. I could hear them repeating totals and amounts to each other, then switching out some candy and doing it over again to figure out what they could get.

After about twenty minutes, I called one of the girls over, and handed her $4 in dollar coins that I happened to have on me. I told her I had a lot of fun just listening to her and her friends do mental math and playing around with it. She was so excited, her friends and she immediately went back into the candy aisle with their new coins, and picked some more things out, doing the math along the way.