Horse

April 24, 2019 3:54 PM

What do you call the mechanical life sized horse that you used to find outside of grocery stores?
posted by PinkMoose to Pets & Animals (16 answers total)

Coin operated kiddie ride
posted by a humble nudibranch at 3:57 PM on April 24, 2019 [5 favorites]

Riding horse?
posted by thelonius at 3:57 PM on April 24, 2019

Best answer: Kiddie ride seems to be the phrase people use for those things. (And they may have seemed life-sized when you were three, but I doubt any grocery store ever had a life-sized horse ride.)
posted by Redstart at 4:00 PM on April 24, 2019 [21 favorites]

When I was a kid it cost 25 cents to make it go so my dad always called it the Quarter Horse. Dad jokes
posted by Pastor of Muppets at 4:02 PM on April 24, 2019 [89 favorites]

In Michigan, this ride was at Meijer, and always called the penny pony ride (you can guess the cost) though I found out years later the horse was officially named Sandy.
posted by meghosaurus at 5:10 PM on April 24, 2019 [7 favorites]

The penny pony still exists at Meijer in Ann Arbor, though it is inside the store, not outside. Not sure about other cities.

(I have also heard quarter horse for the ones that cost a quarter.)
posted by ktkt at 5:46 PM on April 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

I call them all Sandy, after the aforementioned Meijer pony. It's kind of become a metonym for all kids' horse ride things.
posted by kevinbelt at 5:53 PM on April 24, 2019 [2 favorites]

What?! There are more 1¢ Sandys? I really thought they were a NW Iowa specialty. We had one in the local no-brand grocery store in the mid-90s.

To answer the original question: Kiddie Ride.
posted by Guess What at 6:13 PM on April 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

It's not the grocery store kind, but I recently had a beginner's riding lesson on a robot horse called the Equicizer.
posted by daisystomper at 6:25 PM on April 24, 2019 [2 favorites]

The one in my city was at a Ben Franklin store and was called "Brown Horsey".
posted by easy, lucky, free at 7:33 PM on April 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Numerous female comics of a certain age call them Their First Awakening or something similar.
posted by hippybear at 8:00 PM on April 24, 2019 [8 favorites]

I didn’t have an answer for this but when you asked about them I wondered if they still existed and googled and found a potentially interesting article from the Atlantic that seems to go with “kiddie ride.”
posted by Smearcase at 8:31 PM on April 24, 2019

I seem to remember, growing up, that Meijer in Michigan made the horsey ride (which is what I called it) into a bit of marketing, pledging that it would always cost a penny (n.b.: Meijer is a store that I think of primarily as a supermarket/grocery, since that seems to be the bulk of its business, but it also incorporates various low-end electronics, automobile/hardware supplies, clothing, a pet store(!), a barber(!!), and kitchen/bath items).
posted by axiom at 8:42 PM on April 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

They have (had?) ones that aren’t horses, too! I remember the grocery store my parents went to when I was little had a duck.
posted by Weeping_angel at 9:08 PM on April 24, 2019

I remember a camel back in the 70s.
posted by hippybear at 9:24 PM on April 24, 2019

Horsey. (Ask any preschooler.)
posted by she's not there at 1:16 AM on April 25, 2019