Most arcades in the 1980s and ’90s had one. A glass box in the corner, stuffed with plush bears and off-brand cartoon characters, where you would throw away your money for the chance to claw at something you didn’t really want. The claw would drop, close on a bear’s head and lift it, then either lose its grip or hand you something else.
This is the impulse behind the “blind box” economy, the most visible piece of a trend marketers call “kidulting,” adults buying the toys, games and experiences of childhood for themselves. A new Harris Poll report, shared with Fortune ahead of its release, measures how far it has spread. In a survey of 2,158 U.S. adults conducted June 25–27, 80% said they’d done something playful for their own enjoyment in the past year. Among millennials who’d done something playful in the past year, 92% spent money on it and 78% spent $100 or more. Fifty-seven percent of Gen Z and millennials bought a blind box or mystery box for themselves, compared with 16% of Gen X and boomers.
“It’s got the same kind of psychological draw as a slot machine,” Libby Rodney, chief strategy officer at The Harris Poll, told Fortune in an interview. “It’s like a fun, physical lotto ticket that you can buy and then play with and then display.”
The blind box economy is the claw machine scaled to a generation. It sells small, affordable gambles on joy, wrapped in the characters of childhood.
Older millennials, born between 1978 and 1988 by BofA’s definition, spend more per customer on hobbies than any other generation, Fortune reported last month. BofA’s category covers arts and crafts, hobby shops, ski resorts, outdoor retailers, educational toys and some toy stores. It excludes video games, golf and travel, so it is not a direct measure of blind-box buying. In the three months through August, they spent a little more than twice what Gen Z did per customer, according to BofA card data, and a larger share of them have hobby spending than any other generation. Overall hobby spending rose 7.9% year-over-year in August, more than double the 3.4% growth in transactions.
Perhaps impressively, their free time is the shortest of any age group in BofA’s data. Americans ages 35 to 44 average about four hours and 15 minutes of leisure a day, the lowest of the age groups cited in the report. “Older Millennials seem to have more in common with younger Gen Xers than they do with Gen Z or even younger Millennials,” Bank of America Institute economist Joe Wadford previously told Fortune. The data can’t show how much of that money goes to their own collections versus their kids’ hobbies, but BofA says it likely reflects both.
Rodney sees a positive story in the numbers. “I see this as kind of Americans taking a deep exhale and wanting to play,” she told Fortune. It’s emerging as nothing less than a form of self-care in the nostalgia-soaked, screen-riddled economy of the 2020s.
The nostalgia hook
Nostalgia is a big draw for millennials, the Harris survey found. Among millennials, 87% say they feel more emotionally connected to a brand when it taps into their childhood memories, and 86% appreciate it when brands make adult versions of things they loved as kids. Asked what makes a product feel designed for adults rather than kids, 39% of Americans picked “nostalgic references adults understand.”
A separate Harris survey for printing company Quad, released Oct. 14, found 68% of Americans collect at least one type of physical item, including toys and figures (26%) and trading cards (22%). The top reason was nostalgia, cited by 46%.
The toy industry has rebuilt itself around the grown-up buyer. Adult-only households accounted for 55% of U.S. toy sales in the first half of 2026, according to Circana, and that segment grew 16% through June. “At a demographic level, the toy industry’s growth continues to be fueled increasingly by older consumers,” Circana said, as reported by Retail Dive. Wall Street sees it in earnings, too. Hasbro reported Tuesday that revenue at Wizards of the Coast, home of Magic: The Gathering, rose 31% in the third quarter, and that Magic topped $600 million in quarterly revenue for the first time. Wizards produced $367 million of Hasbro’s $517 million in operating profit, according to its earnings release. Even Toys”R”Us, which liquidated its U.S. stores in 2018 after a 2017 bankruptcy filing, plans to open 120 new standalone stores this holiday season.
Arcades are coming back, too, Rodney said: claw-machine stores are opening in New York, Los Angeles and other big cities, Rodney said, with 20 or 30 machines on a single retail floor. “You spend like $70 for 20 minutes and get these mini toys,” she said. “It is a really fun, actually, relief.” Survey respondents describe a similar effect. Fifty-two percent of Americans, and 66% of Gen Z and millennials, call kidulting one of their main forms of self-care. Half of Americans said they’d rather buy blind boxes, build models or collect toys than talk to a therapist. “Therapy is expensive,” Rodney said, suggesting that kidulting “can give you that same kind of relief.” The survey measured what people prefer, not whether play works as a substitute for treatment.
Rodney also framed the trend as a backlash against the past decade’s grind and her own generation’s infamous tendency to work themselves to the bone. “We’ve moved away from hustle culture, and even if we hustle, we don’t talk about it anymore,” she said. People are pushing back against “optimization and maxing culture,” she said, and “the idea that everything we do has to be monetized.” Eighty-three percent of Americans agree that “in uncertain times, small moments of joy feel more important than ever,” and 74% say play makes them feel more hopeful when the world feels heavy. That rises to 80% among millennials.
Rodney also said there are some clearly healthy benefits to this trend. “I think a lot of this money is being redirected from bars and other things into play,” Rodney said. Fifty-three percent of Gen Z and millennials would rather do kidult things than go out for drinks.
Something to hold
The third draw is physical. After a decade of living through their phones, consumers want things they can touch. In the Quad survey, 84% of Americans said owning physical items feels more satisfying than owning digital ones, and 80% said they’re drawn to real-world experiences that don’t revolve around screens. Seventy-five percent said a simpler relationship with technology feels like a lifestyle upgrade, not a sacrifice.
Ernesto Pagano, global sector leader for media at Boston Consulting Group, sees the same shift in his firm’s research. “There is now a social stigma about spending too much time on screens,” he told Fortune. A recent BCG report led by Pagano estimates that “location-based entertainment,” the category that includes theme parks, has the highest revenue yield of any type of media, averaging $3.47 per hour of consumer time, about nine times video’s 39 cents. BCG also asked consumers which media they regretted spending time on, he said. Many named social media and gaming. “What you find is they don’t regret the experiences.”
Rodney said she thinks collecting is partly about proving you exist offline. Younger consumers, she said, “are just collecting things because they want to showcase that they have a physical presence in the world.”
The stigma fades
Adults playing with toys used to be a punchline. Rodney pointed to The 40-Year-Old Virgin, the 2005 comedy whose hero’s action-figure collection was the joke. That was “basically making fun of kidulting,” she said. “Whereas now kidulting is mainstream. It’s cool.”
Some embarrassment lingers. Forty-nine percent of Americans, and 60% of millennials, sometimes feel judged for enjoying things considered childish. But only 12% say embarrassment stops them from spending more.
Critics see something darker. Author Keith Hayward, a University of Copenhagen criminologist, argued in his 2024 book Infantilised: How Our Culture Killed Adulthood that Western culture has stopped people from growing up. Rodney rejected the premise. “The idea that people can be multidimensional and have careers, mortgages and families and still want to play with Legos and go to theme parks isn’t a horrible thing,” she said. “There’s just so many more ways to adult in this world than we’ve ever imagined.”
There are daunting economics behind the retreat. The median first-time homebuyer in the U.S. is now 40, the oldest on record, and first-time buyers made up just 21% of purchases, a record low, according to the National Association of Realtors’ 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers. Fifty-one percent of millennials told Harris they’d rather spend on kidult things than save the money. Among everyone who plays, 46% said affordability makes them more likely to buy, second only to relaxation.
Generative AI was used for research assistance and/or transcription of this article. The reporter independently reported and verified the factual claims in this article, and a human editor reviewed it before publication.