The problem is, the beating up over lunch money thing is a relic from another time. I never saw anyone being beaten up for their lunch money while I was growing up, so apparently it was more common between the 1950s and the 1970s. However, in cartoons and kid's shows, I saw it all the time. I'm guessing the writers were using memories from times past for the episode or tv movie they were writing, but frankly, it always looked weird to me.
From what I remember, in the 90s and early 2000s, most kids used tickets that their moms or dads would buy for them to use for the week. We had a system in both elementary and junior high where we'd bring 5 bucks in, and either have 5 tickets or a card with 5 boxes on it, and we'd take the tickets/cards with use to lunch, and the lady at the cashier would either take the ticket, or mark off one of the boxes on the card to sign off on the meal you'd gotten.
Now things were a little different over at the high school. We did use real money (given to us by our parents or earned at a part-time job) to buy our meals, but they were usually very cheap. I never spent more than $2 a day on either what was for lunch, or the deli isle. But some kids either had a high metabolism, were pigs, or liked to smoke pot and got the munchies, because I would overhear our resident potheads saying they'd spend up to $5 on lunch, and I would at first be appalled until I realized why they would do that. Again, I never saw any kids beat up for lunch money like what you'd see on tv.
It also, unfortunately, painted an erroneous idea in the minds of many kids of my generation, that only boys would get beat up by bullies, bullying only consisted of punching the kid and turning them upside down to shake the money out of their pockets, and that girls never got bullied beyond the odd, oversized bitch who would physically beat them up. Little did I know how the girl bullies really did it until a group of them did it to me using vicious rumors and lies.
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