I've heard countless times that a Barbie doll is purchased every three seconds. That's an interesting fact, but I'd be more interested in it if it was about another Mattel-owned doll line. That's right, I'm talking about American Girl. Since I was bored while I was waiting for my footage to render, I decided to figure out the burning question- how many seconds pass between each American Girl doll purchase?
According to AG's website, over 32 million American Girl dolls have been sold. American Girl has been around for 34 years, so that is roughly 941,176 dolls a year. If we divide that by 365, it's 2578 dolls a day. If we divide by 24, that's 107 dolls an hour. If we divide by 60, it's 1.79 dolls a minute, or 14/8ths every minute.
The point of this post is to find out how many seconds pass between doll 1 and doll 2. So it's a bit over a minute, it seems. If I round 1.79 to 1.8 and add .2 more, that would obviously be 2 dolls every 1 minute and whatever seconds. 1.8 divided by 2 is .9, and if we add six more seconds (for a tenth of a minute), we get 1.
So next time someone says 'a Barbie doll is sold every 3 seconds', you can say 'an American Girl doll is sold every 36 seconds.'
very interesting! :D
Nice math!
While I adore both, I do have to say that Barbie has done very well with diversity since the Fashionista line rebooted, with dolls of all colors of skin and hair, with differing body types and disability representation that actually surpasses AG with a doll available for purchase widely who had a prosthetic leg and two who have wheelchairs, which were of different ethnicities.
I also find the accusation that Barbie revolves around men to be inaccurate. The focus has always been on her careers, which include exploits such as being a pilot, a U.S. President, various military careers, an astronaut (before Sally Ride went into space), a racecar driver, an astrophysicist, and so much more— and again, several careers…
Awesome! I’ll do this with my daughter for math today! 💜
I like Dollfie Dream