People getting restless trying to find trendy toy
Fidget spinners have parents pulling hair out during often-fruitless searches
Are you stressed, anxious, nervous, bored or overwhelmed? Do you have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism or a general lack of focus?
Good news. There’s a new toy that marketers claim can relieve all that.
They’re called fidget spinners and they’re the biggest toy fad since Tamagotchi digital pets blew minds in the 1990s, according to one local retailer. Another likened the craze to the great Cabbage Patch Kids hunt in the early 1980s.
That spinners can cure all that ails you is a suspect claim. But you’ll never really know for sure until you get one in your hands, and that’s the problem — they’re sold out in shops across the region.
James Morgan, owner of Morgan’s Battery Store in Harbour Centre Mall, said he recently had about 60 in-store and they hadn’t been moving. Suddenly — almost overnight — the toys sold out, he said.
“It’s gone crazy,” Morgan said. “Everyone wants to get one.”
Fidget spinners are pretty simple devices. They’re shaped like a three-bladed propeller with one ball bearing in the centre and one on each blade. They spin. You can fidget with them. And there’s not much more to it than that.
Kids and teens are scrambling to find them, but so, too, are shopkeepers. Over at Great West Wholesale, a toy supplier in east Vancouver, Claudia Tyzo has fielded a steady stream of calls from desperate toy-store owners.
“I just look at my caller ID now and I don’t even say, ‘Hi.’ I’m like, ‘The answer is no,’” Tyzo said. “They just laugh.”
She said the wholesaler received three shipments of spinners, but most of them sold before they arrived. The company was supposed to get another 10,000 of them this week, but that shipment has now been delayed until next week, she said.
Several other shopkeepers and another wholesaler said they were out of stock as of Thursday.
But at least one shop in Vancouver has them — the Cell Clinic at 935 Seymour St. Or at least they did by 2 p.m. on Thursday when a fresh shipment came in.
That was shortly after a parent came into the firm’s Surrey location hoping to deliver on a promise to his kid that he’d find a spinner by the time school was out. As Peggy Berndt, the shop’s co-owner, recalled, “He said, ‘What am I going to tell him?’ ”
To that parent — if you couldn’t find any, you could always ask your child to wait a couple of months.
As Morgan said: “By August, there’ll be thousands of them sitting everywhere.”