So, I am speculating here, but if you are a parent you will almost certainly have been subject to your kids crushing desire to get the latest “craze”, whatever it may be.
I have twin boys aged 11 and that’s 11 years worth of chances to be subjected to the peer pressure of playground crazes. Here’s a few that we’ve had to endure: GoGo’s, Moshi Monsters, Loom Bands and now the “Fidget” craze. I feel grateful that my lads are not interested in football or we’d almost certainly have spent £100’s on those football trading cards and stickers too.
What is clear is that these things are all cheaply made in vast quantities and sold at an incredible markup. How much must it cost to press out a plastic figure in quantities in excess of 100,000’s per design? Almost nothing, even with the plastic package added. So there’s a whole supply chains worth of companies and people making millions $ from these simple plastic/rubber things.
I don’t profess to have a background that gives me any understanding of the reasons why some seemingly innocuous thing becomes a playground craze, or frankly, I’d be a millionaire by now, but I do find it fascinating how it can happen.
Of course this is nothing new, there have been crazes throughout the ages, from the stick-and-hoop, spinning tops and pogo sticks to more modern things like 1970’s Star Wars collectible cards that I for one definitely remember trading in the playground as a kid.
But back to the present, and these ridiculous “fidget” things. There is a rumour suggesting these are part of a selection of items created to help people with ADHD and other attention disorders, but that may be completely wrong. Whatever their original intention or use, what we have here are a variety of things such as three-bladed finger spinners, and cubes with multiple faces containing different things such as switches and dials, that act as a distraction to absent-mindedly fiddle with while doing something else.
I regularly look at Kickstarter to see what items are on there and definitely recall seeing this, perhaps the original “fidget cube” back in 2016: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antsylabs/fidget-cube-a-vinyl-desk-toy This thing advertised itself as “An unusually addicting, high-quality desk toy designed to help you focus. Fidget at work, in class, and at home in style.”.
For more info on the back story of this crazy 6-sided distraction, check this news article from CNBC: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/30/a-24-year-old-made-345000-by-beating-kickstarters-to-market.html it would seem that several people have made a lot of money from it.
Anyway, back to me and my kids. It was several weeks back that we started to get pressure from them to get a fidget cube, which we checked on eBay for and bought for around £6 each or so. A lot of money for something that must cost pennies to make in China. However this didn’t end well as due to the choices made by the boys when they selected the colours they wanted, one of the cubes was larger than the others. Something we didn’t notice from the auction listing, as we assumed the price difference was down to the specific “unique” colour chosen by my especially picky son.
So the cubes arrived and one of the lads had one that was larger than the other. This led to many derogatory remarks and moaning as you can imagine. We get a lot of moaning, derogatory remarks and fighting these days — par for the course when you have two tweenage boys.
The next thing we got nagged for was another fidget item — a “fidget spinner”. This is literally nothing more than a central ball bearing with a plastic shape attached that means you can pinch the bearing in your fingers and spin the shape around. I really don’t see the appeal, but neither did I see the appeal of those GoGo’s, especially not when standing on them in bare feet!
So there you have it, I have no conclusion for you if you too are pressured/nagged into letting your kids get the latest craze, other than “saying no”...
In my own defence, the lads paid for the fidget cubes themselves and we treated them to the spinners as they’d made it through SAT’s week at school.
