Recently, my entire household has fallen back into Animal Crossing on the Switch. We love visiting each other’s islands, hosting parties, and playing hide and seek. While it’s all good and fun, I’ve become quite comfortable with my island life and even managed to accumulate 10 million bells for my Animal Crossing retirement fund. But I crave excitement and adventure, and in a spur-of-the-moment decision, I spent nearly all 10 million of my savings on the turnip market in what might be an amazing move, or might see me downsize to a tent, and let’s be honest, if I lose it all, I probably won’t accumulate that small fortune again. There’s so much at stake, that I employed my wife who is an accountant and bookkeeper to oversee the numbers. How will it go? Let’s find out!
For those who don’t know much about the Turnip Market, (Or the Stalk Market as they call it in-game) Players can buy Turnips on Sunday from Daisy Mae. The price will always fluctuate on the buy price, usually 90 to about 110 bells per Turnip, and players will then be able to check the Turnip prices for both AM and PM fluctuations during the week. If you hit it big, you can sell them in excess of 600 bells, but play it poorly, and you can hit as low as 40 bells, decimating your investment. Like the real stock market, there are highs and lows, and ultimately, you will have to offload them by Saturday otherwise they spoil, leaving you with rotten rubbish. This mechanic can make or break your best island life, but it’s also a huge gamble that requires 2 check-ins a day to ensure you sell at the right time. If you do, you can be set for life, and that’s my motivation going into this. I can finally be debt-free from Tom Nook and also complete all my island projects.
My strategy was simple, with 4 family members playing the game, we could check the prices before school and work, and then again when we got home, drastically improving my chances of that huge return. We all logged out initial prices into the website “Turnip Profit,” an IO website that calculates trends and gives you probabilities of peaks and lows. If we were going to pull this off, we needed everything at our disposal. Initial buy prices at my island were 98 bells per turnip, the lowest in our group. So we all started emptying ABD machines and buying up. Turnips can’t be stored, so I started dropping them wherever I could, covering almost a quarter of my island by the time I dwindled my bank account. We set alarms, checking Turnip prices at the breakfast table, and after homework was done. This gamble was going to be too big to fail… Or so we thought…
Monday
We weren’t expecting much on Monday as it never usually pays off this early in the week. No obvious trends were emerging, although by the afternoon, Tunip Profit had determined the numbers I had meant my Turnips would peak at 138 Bells, making me a measly 40 bell profit per turnip. It looked like it would fall to the rest of the family to come through, and it also meant I would have to make roughly 15-20 Dodo Airline trips now, including trying to smuggle all those bells back through customs. It became clear that turning a profit now required a lot more effort. Still, spirits were high going into Tuesday.
Tuesday
Tuesday was filled with more dismay. My wife’s island had Turnips sitting around 120 bells, but everyone else had dipped below the 100 mark. I remembered that dips early on sometimes lead to huge spikes around Thursday so my hope was renewed in cashing out on a high. Turnip Profit remained accurate in confirming my island was dead, and due to a technical error on our part, our other Turnip Profit entries now had incomplete data, meaning we would be in the dark with new financial trends and developments, relying on hunches and estimations.
Wednesday:
Another day of low prices and high anxiety. I’m halfway to the deadline for offloading these Turnips and I’m starting to wonder if the peak was coming tomorrow. I crossed my fingers and toes, Thursday would be the day for big payouts!
Thursday:
Desperation started kicking in.
Friday
I was starting to get nervous, but remembered I had connected and interviewed a few people for my story of Animal Crossing in the pandemic. Were these groups still active? I put the callout and had my first glimmer of hope coming from the other side of the world. I managed to get 9 runs in for bells, selling Turnips at 507. Selling full pockets each run at 2,074,000, less 99,000 bell tip, meaning I was bringing home 1975000 per run. The first island yielded 17,775,000. and I’m only halfway there. The initial buy was 347800 per full inventory, so I made 1,627,200 per run and a total profit of 14,644,800 after the tips and purchase prices. Our time difference meant the shop closed with only 9 runs complete, I would have to look elsewhere to offload the rest of the turnips taking over my island.
Saturday
D-day. It was make or break before the turnips spoiled. The household Turnip prices had now completely crashed and things were looking desperate. My Turnips fared the best at 60 bells, but that was a last-minute resort. I put the call out to all the social media groups, desperately holding out for a decent price. I had commitments to take the kids to their weekend activities, so I would have to have the stars align with US time to make this happen. 2 minutes before I left the house my phone pinged, informing me that a price had been found for $450… Saturday Gymnastics couldn’t wait, and by the time I returned, that ship had sailed. Now it became a race against the clock to cash out before midnight, and it wasn’t looking good.
I waited and waited, trawling the Animal Crossing groups for hope, and with 30 minutes before Nook’s Cranny closed, I made the decision to cut my losses and fold. I frantically started gathering the rest of my turnips, but I wasn’t going to make it, so I enlisted the help of my kids who flew over to my island to gather and sell turnips, dropping the bells in front of the ABD. With just 5 minutes to spare before closing time, we tallied our runs. All runs were sold at 60 bells, 240,000 per stack… a loss of 107,800 meaning a total sale price of 2,400,000 and a loss of 1,185,800 for myself, and the kids managed to rack up 1,920,000 between them, and a loss of $862,400.
In the end, we paid $891,00 in tips and ended up with 24,290,800 bells in my bank account, all from a roughly 10 million bell investment. The time this all took ended up being roughly 6 hours of gameplay, 10 international Dodo flights, and hiring 2 workers to help clean up before 10 pm. Having a journalism diploma, I always have to get reliable sources when covering a story, so I asked my wife to check my notes and go over everything as I felt there may be a discrepancy. It turns out my financial tracking ability almost caused her to have an aneurysm, and after reading my notes and attempting to explain it all to me, she sighed and said “I think you are making me dumber.”
The Turnip market isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme by any means and requires constant monitoring, laborious work, and a spot of luck. If you have plenty of time on your hands, it’s a fun way to play with amazing highs and anxiety-inducing lows. This time, I got lucky, thanks to the online features and communities that still exist around the game, but without these groups, this would have been a different story. You would think I have learned my lesson, gambling my entire fortune and just scraping by, but seeing it’s Sunday, looks like I’ll be doing it again.
