Tuesday, May 2, 2017

Fidget Spinners - The Next Pet Rock?


As a parent of a kindergardener and a jr. high school student, combined with my consulting skills of observation, I'm getting a view into the latest thinking of the next generations.

One of the interesting things I'm seeing is the explosion in popularity of fidget spinners. I think they are going to be a fad like Cabbage Patch Kids, Furby, or Pet Rocks.  Build big and then fade.

1. First, my older son and his friends were making them out of Legos.  

2. Then they wanted to buy them from Amazon and pay expedited shipping.  They even wanted to buy extras to sell to their classmates for profit.

3. Suddenly, they learned that 7-11 started keeping them behind the counter.  They sold out fast.

4. The Jr. high principal sent an email saying that fidget spinners were being banned from school because the kids were distracted, trading them, etc.

5. Now, I'm seeing newspaper columns about them.

6. Finally, I looked up fidget spinners on Google Trends.  Searches for them exploded, starting in April:




Considering that fidget spinners were originally created to calm ADHD kids, what does that indicate for future attention spans?