Animal Crossing is a series about bootstrapping your way out of debt and into wealth and happiness. Now that most ACNH players have finally escaped the yoke of Tom Nook, there’s a new grifter in town: Lottie. According to one fan who did the math, the head of the house flipping enterprise as the heart of the Happy Home Paradise DLC is a sketchy little otter. I fucking knew it.
If you’re not familiar with the latest ACNH DLC, it sets up a new side economy where players decorate new homes and earn something called Poki in exchange. It’s used exclusively to buy rare furniture from the new shop run by Wardell in the Happy Home Archipelago. You can’t use Bells there, just Poki, which you earn 6,000 of on average from designing each new home. (The amount varies depending on the job and the client’s happiness with your work.) TikTok user ratchetintellectual decided to run some conversions, however, and discovered that Lottie should be paying them a lot more.
“Downloaded the DLC for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, I love it, but Lottie is exploiting us and our labor and I have proof,” she said in a new video.
The proof revolves around a banker’s lamp, which costs 1,600 Bells at Nook’s Cranny and 1,400 Poki at Wardell’s shop. That means 7 Poki is roughly equal to 8 Bells, making each home remodel worth 6,857 Bells. If the average price of a banker’s lamp IRL is around $37.5 (it varies, but a quick Google search shows this is in the ballpark), then $1 is roughly equal to 42.66 Bells and 37.33 Poki.
“Here’s where this shit really starts piling up,” ratchetintellectual continues.
Rough estimates of the cost of interior design are $975 per room. In theory that’s what players should be getting for their one-room home makeovers in Happy Home Paradise if they were paid in U.S. Benjamins. What would it be in ACNH currency? 41,593 Bells and 36,400 Poki.
“We should literally be making six times what Lottie is paying us in her ‘company money,’” she concludes. “Literally lottie is operating a company town—a Fordlandia—and like all capitalists are exploiting the labor of their workers.”
Time for villagers to rise up and seize the means of production, or at least negotiate a better contract. A fair day’s Poki for a fair day’s work!