In Silicon Valley, Halloween Trick Or Treaters Get Kale
PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA — In neighborhoods all across the Bay Area, children dressed up in costumes and indulged in the ancient tradition of trick-or-treating this last Halloween. Look a little more carefully though, and you’ll see that Halloween in the heartland of Tech was a little bit different from the rest of the country, and not just because of the tricked out pumpkins and Steve Jobs costumes.
Gone are the days of houses that give out giant candy bars. These days, in notoriously health-conscious Silicon Valley, you’re more likely to get dried fruit, gluten-free granola, or tasteless soylent.
Instead of buying treats from a supermarket, techie parents increasingly opt to steal free snacks from their workplaces. Multiple companies have already sent out chastising emails to their employees. One email condemned the practice as “directly responsible for the devastation of our snack kitchens.”
Much to the chagrin of trick-or-treaters, that means the worst of tech snacks are also being distributed on the streets. “Seriously, kale chips? What’s next, kombucha?” complained one child dressed as Erlich Bachman. “Congratulations Palo Alto, you’ve ruined Halloween!”
Kale chips aren’t the only way that Silicon Valley is upgrading the Halloween experience. Almost every parent has worried about the safety of their kids when sending them out trick-or-treating without adult supervision, but some tech parents have found a compromise that allows kids to have fun on their own while allowing their parents to keep a watchful eye on them. A creative engineer at Tile sewed one of their GPS trackers into her son’s costume so she could keep track of where he went from her phone and send alerts to him when it was time to come home. Tile recently published a blog post that popularized the practice among many tech-conscious parents. “I keep track of my keys with it anyway, so why not keep track of my kids too?” said one parent, who works as an executive at a large social media company.
Children have also been innovating on their end. Instead of the antiquated method of friends assembling ad-hoc maps of the juiciest houses to hit up for candy bars, the newest generation has turned to more efficient digital means. 3rd grader Eric Li created an app called “CandySpotter” that “crowdsources candy discovery” by allowing anyone to place a geo-pin with a rating of the location’s candy quality. Mr. Li is already thinking of how to monetize the app — his ideas include running ads for halloween costumes, by creating a marketplace for kids to trade candy in return for transaction fees, or by launching an ICO for a new stablecoin backed by candy bars.
“My entrepreneurship teacher told me that I need to constantly be maximizing ROI,” said Mr. Li. “so I thought I’d start with getting hella candy.”
