STICKY FINGERS STRESS OUT RETAILERS SELLING AN ADDICTIVE GADGET
Fidget spinners create frenzied demand that store owners struggle to satisfy By Michael Wilson
They are kept behind the counter at the 7-Eleven store on New York’s Upper East Side, out of reach and available only by request, like cigarettes and lottery tickets and chewing tobacco. So close yet so far from the restless fingers that crave them the most.
It has come to this. Fidget spinners, the seemingly overnight sensations that have flooded the city with the round gadgets, a phenomenon now unknown only to the long-term incarcerated, the cloistered and the shut in, have attracted the inevitable criminal element.
A fidget spinner, when grasped properly between finger and thumb, allows its operator to spin it rapidly in his or her hand, the duration of its movement extended by ball bearings embedded in its small frame. It is said to relieve stress. As simple as they sound on paper, they have become so enmeshed in daily life that one wonders how people young and old got by all this time without them.
New Yorkers love spinning the spinners between their fingers as much as the rest of the world, and it is perhaps not surprising that some of those fingers are sticky.
“Kids touch them and of course steal them,” a manager at the 7-Eleven said. How many? “There’s no way for me to know.”
While hardly a crime wave, a few of the city’s bigger toy stores have had problems as well.
“We definitely may lose one or two in a batch that we get,” said Caitie Harkins, a manager at Boomerang Toys in Tribeca. Asked if they had been stolen, she replied: “We can only assume.”
Other store managers laughed at the idea of people stealing spinners — because there are not enough to steal.
“They sold out so quickly that no one had a chance,” said Mallory Milloway, a manager at the Kidding Around store in Grand Central Terminal. “We can’t keep them on the shelves. It’s crazy.”
She checked her records and said the inventory was fully accounted for this week. But elsewhere in the city, the sale of fidget spinners is decidedly off the books.
“Fidget Spinners!” read a handmade sign on West 40th Street near a subway entrance. Nearby was a table with a motley array of the toys, seemingly from various manufacturers and bearing different names such as “Krazy Spinner” and “Finger Spinner”. They typically sell for between US$5 and $20. Tables like this have no counter, no security, no itemised inventory.
Chasing a thief is futile and counterproductive, said the vendor, as other thieves take advantage to steal more spinners.
He and other vendors said they had assumed that the stolen spinners were in turn sold for a few dollars. People selling spinners are everywhere, even below ground, in subway cars.
A few blocks south, several tables lined with fidget spinners surrounded Herald Square. Two vendors who had claimed a patch of shade on West 33rd Street said fidget spinners and crime obeyed the same principles as everything else: location, location, location.
“Different environments,” said one. “It all depends on your location.”
His partner offered his own take on why thefts occur: “The person at the table is not paying attention.”
The first vendor said of spinner thieves “It’s in their character” before broadening his musings to a philosophical realm: “You’re living in a bootleg world. Everything that’s real doesn’t have to be real.”
This observation, Platonic in its way, raised questions: What, really, was a fidget spinner? Where is the original form, and are there copies? Is there a market for knock-off spinners?
The provenance of the device is muddled, a situation that will not be clarified here. A woman invented one, maybe, or something rather like the kind we see today, but let the patent lapse and has not made a dime from the fidget-spinner bubble. So it seems that rather than an original spinner being copied, the spinners today all seem to be copies of each other.
There is a place in New York that is known as a destination for people who want to buy copies of other, more expensive things. That place is called Canal Street in Chinatown. Sure enough, on Canal Street today, fidget spinners are the new purses. The small storefronts, the longtime targets of police raids seeking counterfeit handbags, now display boxes of fidget spinners in their entrances.
Here were found the same names for the spinners uptown, along with new ones: “Flip Spinner”, “Spinner Hand”, “Fingertip Dance”. A store with a neon sign that read “Wholesale Diamonds” had a box of spinners below.
In one store with a sign reading “Vape Shop”, a trio of experts on the matter of fidget spinners, 12-year-old boys, huddled around a glass case displaying the high-end spinners the way boys of another generation peeked through holes in a fence outside a ball game.
“Some of them are fake,” said one boy, Kevin. “They look cool but they are, like, rusty.”
“Some of them make a noise,” his friend David said in agreement.
Some have been tampered with and lack that new fidget spinner glow.
“He just bought one,” Kevin said of David. “It was used and scratched up.” But David showed the flaws to the store owner and was allowed to pick out a new one.
“This place has the best ones,” said the third boy, Eric.
A different kind of spinner return played out at Boomerang Toys recently. “We noticed we were missing one,” Harkins recalled. “It was a couple hours later, and a family came in and a little kid came up to the counter and apologised.” He sheepishly handed over a stolen spinner.
“We told him it’s not nice to steal,” Harkins said, “but we appreciate your honesty in bringing it back.”