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The Rise of the Fidget Spinner and the Fall of the Well-Managed Fad

87 points by shalmanese 9y ago

ars 9y ago
If you read between the lines this is the broken window fallacy: We need people to make useless junk in order to have jobs. But now there is no one making sure the useless junk stays popular, so less jobs. Except that's exactly the broken window fallacy: We could instead spend that money on other things.
- sodawater 9y ago
  Ars knows what's useless better than people who spend their own money.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  Sounds like Silicon Valley (the actual place) and software dev. Well, at least we can look forward to a new messaging app for teams. :D :(
- vosper 9y ago
  Well I guess we just move on to different junk. Rather than one company (Ty, from the example) presiding over and managing the popularity of the product for years, the fads come and go. Which is of course what's always happened. Remember Pokemon? There's a craze that's not a craze at all - it's been going on since the 90s. It doesn't seem to be getting killed by fidget spinners. In the meantime hundreds of smaller fads have come and gone. We've have the words "fad" and "craze" to describe this sort of thing since way before the rise of rapid-response Chinese manufacturing.
  - monocasa 9y ago
    Seriously. Furbies, tamogatchis, pogs. There was that season where suburban moms were practically dueling to the death over Tickle Me Elmos.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      Can't you see the difference here? Nobody is lining up outside stores to get a fidget spinner because you can't go two feet without seeing one for sale.
      - monocasa 9y ago
        It was the same with pogs, and knockoff tamogatchis.
        emodendroket 9y ago
        But having a knockoff wasn't the same. I mean, there's no such thing as a knockoff fidget spinner because there is no official one.
    - erikb 9y ago
      But honestly aren't all of these more complex than Fidget Spinners? I feel like we've reached a new low with these.
      - Joe-Z 9y ago
        You can learn all sorts of tricks with them too. Maybe it's just you getting older and developing more of a 'get off my lawn'-mentality? :D
- peacetreefrog 9y ago
  Yeah there's a strong "jobs for jobs sake" vibe in this article.
- barrkel 9y ago
  It's not 100% fallacy if there's slack in the labour market. If you have 10 chaps hanging around, all of whom have broken windows, there's a gain in both wealth and employment if some of those chaps get organized and start fixing windows. To the degree that the novelty is good, keeping otherwise unemployed people active producing novelties is neither a loss nor a waste of time. Of course it doesn't make sense to go around breaking windows to keep the dynamic up, unless breaking windows is enormous fun and gives people lots of utility (which it might!). More generally, thinking about these things in terms of money rather than wealth, production and consumption (a stock and its positive and negative flows) leads people to faulty intuitions. They're familiar with household budgeting and other situations where money seems tangible. But money is just a way of accounting for the stock, and measuring and transporting the flows. It's the actual wealth, production and consumption that counts.
  - tombusby 9y ago
    > there's a gain in both wealth and employment if some of those chaps get organized and start fixing windows. This is the core of the fallacy. There'd be more net wealth without breaking the window in the first place, leaving the guy free to spend that money on someone else's goods/services, who would cause the exact same amount of growth but you'd still have a window. Spending that money that would have been spent replacing broken windows elsewhere may even generate jobs for the guys who are slack. You can never stimulate a growth of wealth by destroying wealth. If you're saying the window is already broken, that's not the broken window fallacy.
    - barrkel 9y ago
      I already said that the windows were already broken. And I explicitly said people who would be otherwise unemployed. It's like you didn't read what I wrote. And if breaking windows is a thing we value in society, then it wouldn't be a bad thing to go around breaking windows and continuously employ people to fix them up again. The reason I'm stretching it like this is to make "broken windows fallacy" fit fidget spinners and other fads, because that's what's needed to make the analogy work. (You know, the actual topic.) You can never stimulate a growth of wealth by destroying wealth I never said you could. People can, however, increase their wellbeing by consuming wealth, and a cycle of consuming wealth and producing wealth is not a waste of time; if breaking windows was beneficial to wellbeing, then it wouldn't be a waste of time to continuously cycle between breaking and repairing windows. Don't forget that wealth isn't a terminal value anyone is interested in; wellbeing (aka utility) is.
- dmalvarado 9y ago
  Did you get to the part about essentially all travel agencies being disintermediated? Fidget junk is just an allegory for a much more pervasive trend.
  - kelnos 9y ago
    I don't buy it. The disintermediation of travel agencies has made it easier and cheaper for me to travel. I don't want to sit on the phone with someone while they read off options to me, while extracting a fee to do so; I can figure out the options and make the decisions myself. I don't need a travel agent to tell me about the exciting places I can go; I have well-traveled friends, and travel blogs. I feel like the travel agency bit in there actually worked against their thesis.
- a1371 9y ago
  Not to be confused with Broken Window Theory
- milesvp 9y ago
  Not exactly. Economics is all about trading. Trading is all about wants, desires, and needs. If I make something that everyone wants, it is not useless junk, useless junk is something nobody wants. So it's actually very important to have feedback from middlemen who's livelihood is actually tied to successfully making available desirable things. There's an economic study I remember seeing in the last couple of decades that studied the value of middlemen. The study started with the assumption that middlemen were parasitic entities, especially since so much economic value seems to come from "cutting out the middle man". But the study authors were most surprised about was that the countries they studied that had the most middlemen, also had the greatest number of economic health indicators. That is they found middlemen to be highly correlated with the economic output of an economy. Their conclusion was that it was probably more than correlated, but largely causative and that middle men probably provided a lot more value than they're generally given credit for. This article seems to be providing some anecdotal data that supports the value of middle men. At the very least they are good at synthesizing back pressure data for factories so they don't end up overproducing, and have to fill landfills with stuff no one wants.
  - NoodleIncident 9y ago
    Making something that everyone wants is a separate thing than making everyone want something. You can do both and make a lot of money, but if the former is fixing the windows the latter broke people still aren't better off. For the "middle man" study, I don't know how they came to that conclusion. But the more obvious assumption seems to be that economic output can support more middlemen, so I'm curious what data they used to argue that it works the other way around.
    - icanhackit 9y ago
      > the more obvious assumption seems to be that economic output can support more middlemen, so I'm curious what data they used to argue that it works the other way around. That was my conclusion as well - when times are good you don't mind someone who contributes little hanging around. When times are tough, they're out and what little value they offered is replicated by someone desperate to stick around. When a business has a lot of administrative staff times are good and those watching the market can conclude, due to the number of administrative hires, that times are good for a particular market sector. But concluding that it means middlemen are undervalued seems like whoever authored the study had some odd motive.
- tschwimmer 9y ago
  The broken windows fallacy has an element of coercion or force that's not present in consumer fads. Nobody is forcing anyone to buy fidget spinners in order to live their lives/operate their business. The baker replaces his broken window because it's untenable not to. People buy fidget spinners because they _choose_ to value the spinner more than other goods that they could purchase.
  - Retra 9y ago
    That element of coercion is not necessary to maintain the fallacy. The broken window is merely an analogy for any waste, and the fallacy is trying to justify the creation of waste on the grounds that one can run an economy on dealing with it. In the end, the fallacy is that "it allows us to run an economy" doesn't actually justify anything.
  - kelnos 9y ago
    What is marketing if not coercion?
noir_lord 9y ago
My stepson went through the fidget spinner phase in about a month, I think he has a dozen of the damn things I keep finding them. The longest he's stayed interested in anything is a cheap kite I bought him, so I think next year remote control plane.
- ljf 9y ago
  (off topic sorry) but how about a better kite? A Revolution 4 line is an amazing kite, and stupidly fun to play with and brilliant to watch. And can be launched alone. Highly recommend them, example video - https://youtu.be/sPSyuvCJF4M https://youtu.be/sPSyuvCJF4M So much can (and will) go wrong with an rc plane - another alternative would be a quad?
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    The reason I thought RC Plane is because of the cool factor and you can get the polystyrene starter kits that can survive a hefty crash plus it's a change to teach him about electronics and we can attack a camera to it. He also wants to build a robot so I'm thinking something tracked with camera's and sensors.
    - ljf 9y ago
      Nice - planes are great if you have the space - just remember how much time I spent repairing them ;) Love my quads now - even a hubsan x4 is a great starter - can fly inside and outside - though not big enough to carry weight - anyway, sure you'll get him something cool - lucky kid ;)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
amrrs 9y ago
It's rise in India is so fast and deep that it's been sold in local trains for 40-50 Indian rupees (~70 cents). Almost everyone from kids to adults in office and park started spinning it for no reason because they saw someone else spinning and it was just cool. PS: I bought two while in the local train. For me and my wife. A day before that a kid in my flat was showing off his skills and a week after that my 40ish manager was spinning it while walking around. And now I hardly see someone spinning.
- Raphmedia 9y ago
  > 40-50 Indian rupees (~70 cents) Ha! They sold for CAD$15 around here...
  - georgebarnett 9y ago
    They were selling for $10 AU here and somehow 3 weeks later I got one for free because the craze was dead and somebody has excess stock. Being patient pays off so often.
  - cakedoggie 9y ago
    I bet they were also selling for CAD$2 if you go to the right place.
  - kalleboo 9y ago
    I just saw one, with built-in LED lights and a bluetooth speaker(!) on banggood for $1 with free international shipping.
- okreallywtf 9y ago
  This reminds me of the great (I think) star trek TNG episode The Game (I had to look up the name, then felt silly). I imagine you and your wife picking them up just to be able to make it home without being accosted.
  - samstave 9y ago
    Is that the one where Wesley gets addicted and they basically have to do an intervention on him?
jonny_eh 9y ago
Not all fads are the same. Some are genuinely interesting product lines that just happen to start as a fad, but stick around (Beanie Babies, video games, and Magic: The Gathering). Others are just fads with no legs (Fidget Spinners, Slap Bracelets, and Cabbage Patch Dolls).
- HaloZero 9y ago
  Why does Beanie Babies stay around vs Cabbage Patch Dolls? I imagine that's because the marketing and other mechanisms for popularity they mention in the article.
- downrightmike 9y ago
  They had to ban slap bracelets because the cheap knock offs weren't sanded down and ended up being sharp pieces of tape measures tape.
  - jonny_eh 9y ago
    The first prototype was built using measuring tape: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/you-have-to-invent-something-season-5-episode-1/ https://gimletmedia.com/episode/you-have-to-invent-something...
themark 9y ago
"disintermediation" I believe this is how an IYI says "cut out the middle man".
- theothermkn 9y ago
  It may be. It might also be the term that economists use when they talk to each other, to avoid having to go to "Cut Out the Middle Man Conference 2017." Just because someone isn't using a colloquialism doesn't mean they're pretending to be an intellectual.
  - themark 9y ago
    Is there really a conference about transitioning to direct sales?
- crikli 9y ago
  What does "IYI" mean?
  - theothermkn 9y ago
    Google tells me "Intellectual Yet Idiot." The #iamverysmart police seem to need new cover, IMO.
    - crikli 9y ago
      Thanks! For some reason that didn't come up, all I got was an urban dictionary reference that didn't seem in context. Wonder of this article is the source? https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577 https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e...
  - r1chard5mith 9y ago
    I think the term was coined by Nassim Taleb https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577 https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e...
theothermkn 9y ago
It's hard to put my finger on what exactly unsettled me about the fidget spinner craze, but it seems related to this article. All the hype seemed ad hoc. For Beanie Babies, in retrospect, it felt like a coordinated center (the manufacturer/importer and its marketing arm) surrounded by a bunch of people jumping on the bandwagon. Fidget spinners just felt like every click-baiting view-monger jumping in with their hot take. There seemed to be, from the outside, no central brand or centralized messaging. The closest thing to the latter seemed to be the urban legend that these things were good for ADHD, somehow. Even Baudrillard's hyper-reality seemed to be orchestrated from a center; his assertion that the Europe experience at Disney World was "more real" than Europe itself at least required Disney to have built it. Spinners just arose out of the background radiation, with no apparent proximal cause.
- kobeya 9y ago
  Someone, somewhere created the first fidget spinner, named it, and marketed it. The fact that you do t know their name maybe just means they did a better job of staying out of the limelight while still profiting from the craze.
  - TheSoftwareGuy 9y ago
    There is also the (perhaps more likely) possibility that all three of Thise things were done by different people. For example the creator makes it and shows it to a few friends, maybe posts pics/vids on the internet. Someone else sees the object and names it the fidget spinner. A third person markets it and begins selling them
  - smacktoward 9y ago
    Why do you assume the original inventor profited from it? It seems at least as likely that they got left in the dust when someone else noticed the potential in their idea and grabbed it -- especially if the main driver behind the craze were Chinese manufacturers, who are not exactly known for their scrupulous respect for intellectual property...
  - DanBC 9y ago
vosper 9y ago
I'm confused... she sold tens of thousands of dollars of fidget spinners, getting on that craze immediately that she heard about it (she had product within 5 days) and knowing that it was a fad that was destined to die out (hardly the first... I remember Tamagotchi's pretty well, and the apparently New Zealand-only Chatter Ring). I don't think the comparison to TripAdvisor and travel agents is particularly strong, and I think you'd be hard pushed to make the case that thousands of travel agents who'd maybe heard something about the place you wanted to go is better than thousands of reviews and photos from people who've actually been there. TipAdvisor has lots of problems, to be sure, but it's still better than travel agents. Unrelated to the above, I'm actually excited for the craze to die out. I think I might be one of the people fidget spinners were originally made for. I don't have any problems focusing, but I habitually spin things in my fingers - my iPhone, my wallet (I've worn marks into the leather), pens... It's usually completely unconscious. So I'll be looking forward to trying a fidget spinner once the fad has gone away.
- gknoy 9y ago
  > I'll be looking forward to trying a fidget spinner once the fad has gone away. If you feel it would be beneficial to try it, why wait until the fad dies before trying one? This seems like it might be an optimal time to have the maximum breadth of choices to find the one(s) you find most helpful.
  - paulgb 9y ago
    And the prices have been dropping. My girlfriend got me one recently and I do find it good for keeping me focused if I'm reading or watching something.
- yesiamyourdad 9y ago
  > I don't think the comparison to TripAdvisor and travel agents is particularly strong, and I think you'd be hard pushed to make the case that thousands of travel agents who'd maybe heard something about the place you wanted to go is better than thousands of reviews and photos from people who've actually been there. TipAdvisor has lots of problems, to be sure, but it's still better than travel agents. Do you remember what it was like using a travel agent? That's not what travel agents did. They didn't "maybe hear about a place", they actually went there. Resorts & cruises spent a ton of their marketing dollars to bring travel agents to the resort and get them to experience it first hand.
patorjk 9y ago
> ‘‘Now, in less than half a year, spinners are done,’’ Osborne says. ‘‘I’m moving on to squishies’’ — squishable toys that are also (questionably) marketed as attention aids. ‘‘I think they’ll last at least a few months.’’ As a side note, squishies have been around for a while too, at least since last year. My son is a big fan of them. I'm pretty sure he learned about them from YouTube kids, which sometimes seems like trove of toy commercials. Unlike what Ms. Osborne seems to think, I don't think fads in the future will be any shorter, I think they'll just be created in different ways.
- rconti 9y ago
  In the late 80s or early 90s there was a stress reliever squishy thing that was pink and had some odd shape.. I want to say like a brain or something. And of course stress balls have been trade show junk for decades.
graphememes 9y ago
Same thing happens with twitter lynch mobs. Another day, another victim.
tinus_hn 9y ago
I'm not sure a simple fad like the fidget spinner that explodes out of nowhere is the same as a meticulously marketed toy line.
Giorgi 9y ago
I think it started on Reddit, someone posted some gif, others asked what it was, and after several months we had craze going on our hands. I remember specifically how I checked if any Chinese manufacturers where producing it by that time - none. In fact, item in post on reddit was done on some CNC machine. then all the small-scale importers got on it. These days, it's really easy to move and market your own product small-scale. I think all other fads will follow this fate - lot's of suppliers, rarely any brandname.
- lbotos 9y ago
  I mean we saw the same thing with "hoverboards" right? There was never a "branded" one, just a bunch of Chinese manufacturer brands.
XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
> As Osborne learned when she started selling Beanie Babies, middlemen like Joyce are often the ones who turn a fad into a sustainable business that creates jobs. So the NYT is saying that beanie babies were a sustainable business that creates the ever elusive "jobs". It was sustainable in that it lasted longer, but beanie babies are not still a sustainable business. If the metric of success is ~7 years of business then Maddoff was running a sustainable business.
alanh 9y ago
boo fucking hoo. something happened without a central corporation planning and profiting from a wave of upset parents unable to get a worthless item that would make their kid cool for a week? seriously, where is the problem?
jliptzin 9y ago
"Well managed" meaning artificially restricting the supply to create scarcity and inflate prices? As for disintermediation, there's still plenty of room for travel agents and the like to add value. Sure travelocity, tripadvisor etc exist, but for higher end clients who don't want/can't afford to waste time sifting through pages and pages of data/reviews from anonymous internet people, they can hire someone with experience to do all that, or perhaps someone who has built a reputation of recommending excellent itineraries all around the world. Otherwise, it's nice to have the option to do it yourself much more cheaply and efficiently. That money saved by not hiring an agent can now be put into the vacation package for better airfare, lodging, restaurants, etc. The money and jobs don't just disappear, they go elsewhere.
- rconti 9y ago
  Yup, and as usual, a few folks were winners in the beanie baby craze, and the same goes for the travel industry. I can't see a single thing these "middlemen" create in the travel industry that's desirable for the consumer. I'm sorry, I don't need a travel agent to tell me how to find a cool, hip destination overrun with everyone else the travel industry is sending there. They probably sell fidget spinners at the arrivals area, anyway.
bitwize 9y ago
This week on Hackernews: criticizing big companies for turning toy crazes into huge profits. Last week on Hackernews: a paean to Wham-O, manufacturers of the hula hoop.

87 points by shalmanese 9y ago

ars 9y ago

If you read between the lines this is the broken window fallacy: We need people to make useless junk in order to have jobs. But now there is no one making sure the useless junk stays popular, so less jobs. Except that's exactly the broken window fallacy: We could instead spend that money on other things.

sodawater 9y ago
Ars knows what's useless better than people who spend their own money.
aaron-lebo 9y ago
Sounds like Silicon Valley (the actual place) and software dev. Well, at least we can look forward to a new messaging app for teams. :D :(
vosper 9y ago
Well I guess we just move on to different junk. Rather than one company (Ty, from the example) presiding over and managing the popularity of the product for years, the fads come and go. Which is of course what's always happened. Remember Pokemon? There's a craze that's not a craze at all - it's been going on since the 90s. It doesn't seem to be getting killed by fidget spinners. In the meantime hundreds of smaller fads have come and gone. We've have the words "fad" and "craze" to describe this sort of thing since way before the rise of rapid-response Chinese manufacturing.
- monocasa 9y ago
  Seriously. Furbies, tamogatchis, pogs. There was that season where suburban moms were practically dueling to the death over Tickle Me Elmos.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    Can't you see the difference here? Nobody is lining up outside stores to get a fidget spinner because you can't go two feet without seeing one for sale.
    - monocasa 9y ago
      It was the same with pogs, and knockoff tamogatchis.
      - emodendroket 9y ago
        But having a knockoff wasn't the same. I mean, there's no such thing as a knockoff fidget spinner because there is no official one.
  - erikb 9y ago
    But honestly aren't all of these more complex than Fidget Spinners? I feel like we've reached a new low with these.
    - Joe-Z 9y ago
      You can learn all sorts of tricks with them too. Maybe it's just you getting older and developing more of a 'get off my lawn'-mentality? :D
peacetreefrog 9y ago
Yeah there's a strong "jobs for jobs sake" vibe in this article.
barrkel 9y ago
It's not 100% fallacy if there's slack in the labour market. If you have 10 chaps hanging around, all of whom have broken windows, there's a gain in both wealth and employment if some of those chaps get organized and start fixing windows. To the degree that the novelty is good, keeping otherwise unemployed people active producing novelties is neither a loss nor a waste of time. Of course it doesn't make sense to go around breaking windows to keep the dynamic up, unless breaking windows is enormous fun and gives people lots of utility (which it might!). More generally, thinking about these things in terms of money rather than wealth, production and consumption (a stock and its positive and negative flows) leads people to faulty intuitions. They're familiar with household budgeting and other situations where money seems tangible. But money is just a way of accounting for the stock, and measuring and transporting the flows. It's the actual wealth, production and consumption that counts.
- tombusby 9y ago
  > there's a gain in both wealth and employment if some of those chaps get organized and start fixing windows. This is the core of the fallacy. There'd be more net wealth without breaking the window in the first place, leaving the guy free to spend that money on someone else's goods/services, who would cause the exact same amount of growth but you'd still have a window. Spending that money that would have been spent replacing broken windows elsewhere may even generate jobs for the guys who are slack. You can never stimulate a growth of wealth by destroying wealth. If you're saying the window is already broken, that's not the broken window fallacy.
  - barrkel 9y ago
    I already said that the windows were already broken. And I explicitly said people who would be otherwise unemployed. It's like you didn't read what I wrote. And if breaking windows is a thing we value in society, then it wouldn't be a bad thing to go around breaking windows and continuously employ people to fix them up again. The reason I'm stretching it like this is to make "broken windows fallacy" fit fidget spinners and other fads, because that's what's needed to make the analogy work. (You know, the actual topic.) You can never stimulate a growth of wealth by destroying wealth I never said you could. People can, however, increase their wellbeing by consuming wealth, and a cycle of consuming wealth and producing wealth is not a waste of time; if breaking windows was beneficial to wellbeing, then it wouldn't be a waste of time to continuously cycle between breaking and repairing windows. Don't forget that wealth isn't a terminal value anyone is interested in; wellbeing (aka utility) is.
dmalvarado 9y ago
Did you get to the part about essentially all travel agencies being disintermediated? Fidget junk is just an allegory for a much more pervasive trend.
- kelnos 9y ago
  I don't buy it. The disintermediation of travel agencies has made it easier and cheaper for me to travel. I don't want to sit on the phone with someone while they read off options to me, while extracting a fee to do so; I can figure out the options and make the decisions myself. I don't need a travel agent to tell me about the exciting places I can go; I have well-traveled friends, and travel blogs. I feel like the travel agency bit in there actually worked against their thesis.
a1371 9y ago
Not to be confused with Broken Window Theory
milesvp 9y ago
Not exactly. Economics is all about trading. Trading is all about wants, desires, and needs. If I make something that everyone wants, it is not useless junk, useless junk is something nobody wants. So it's actually very important to have feedback from middlemen who's livelihood is actually tied to successfully making available desirable things. There's an economic study I remember seeing in the last couple of decades that studied the value of middlemen. The study started with the assumption that middlemen were parasitic entities, especially since so much economic value seems to come from "cutting out the middle man". But the study authors were most surprised about was that the countries they studied that had the most middlemen, also had the greatest number of economic health indicators. That is they found middlemen to be highly correlated with the economic output of an economy. Their conclusion was that it was probably more than correlated, but largely causative and that middle men probably provided a lot more value than they're generally given credit for. This article seems to be providing some anecdotal data that supports the value of middle men. At the very least they are good at synthesizing back pressure data for factories so they don't end up overproducing, and have to fill landfills with stuff no one wants.
- NoodleIncident 9y ago
  Making something that everyone wants is a separate thing than making everyone want something. You can do both and make a lot of money, but if the former is fixing the windows the latter broke people still aren't better off. For the "middle man" study, I don't know how they came to that conclusion. But the more obvious assumption seems to be that economic output can support more middlemen, so I'm curious what data they used to argue that it works the other way around.
  - icanhackit 9y ago
    > the more obvious assumption seems to be that economic output can support more middlemen, so I'm curious what data they used to argue that it works the other way around. That was my conclusion as well - when times are good you don't mind someone who contributes little hanging around. When times are tough, they're out and what little value they offered is replicated by someone desperate to stick around. When a business has a lot of administrative staff times are good and those watching the market can conclude, due to the number of administrative hires, that times are good for a particular market sector. But concluding that it means middlemen are undervalued seems like whoever authored the study had some odd motive.
tschwimmer 9y ago
The broken windows fallacy has an element of coercion or force that's not present in consumer fads. Nobody is forcing anyone to buy fidget spinners in order to live their lives/operate their business. The baker replaces his broken window because it's untenable not to. People buy fidget spinners because they _choose_ to value the spinner more than other goods that they could purchase.
- Retra 9y ago
  That element of coercion is not necessary to maintain the fallacy. The broken window is merely an analogy for any waste, and the fallacy is trying to justify the creation of waste on the grounds that one can run an economy on dealing with it. In the end, the fallacy is that "it allows us to run an economy" doesn't actually justify anything.
- kelnos 9y ago
  What is marketing if not coercion?

noir_lord 9y ago

My stepson went through the fidget spinner phase in about a month, I think he has a dozen of the damn things I keep finding them. The longest he's stayed interested in anything is a cheap kite I bought him, so I think next year remote control plane.

ljf 9y ago
(off topic sorry) but how about a better kite? A Revolution 4 line is an amazing kite, and stupidly fun to play with and brilliant to watch. And can be launched alone. Highly recommend them, example video - https://youtu.be/sPSyuvCJF4M https://youtu.be/sPSyuvCJF4M So much can (and will) go wrong with an rc plane - another alternative would be a quad?
- noir_lord 9y ago
  The reason I thought RC Plane is because of the cool factor and you can get the polystyrene starter kits that can survive a hefty crash plus it's a change to teach him about electronics and we can attack a camera to it. He also wants to build a robot so I'm thinking something tracked with camera's and sensors.
  - ljf 9y ago
    Nice - planes are great if you have the space - just remember how much time I spent repairing them ;) Love my quads now - even a hubsan x4 is a great starter - can fly inside and outside - though not big enough to carry weight - anyway, sure you'll get him something cool - lucky kid ;)

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

amrrs 9y ago

It's rise in India is so fast and deep that it's been sold in local trains for 40-50 Indian rupees (~70 cents). Almost everyone from kids to adults in office and park started spinning it for no reason because they saw someone else spinning and it was just cool. PS: I bought two while in the local train. For me and my wife. A day before that a kid in my flat was showing off his skills and a week after that my 40ish manager was spinning it while walking around. And now I hardly see someone spinning.

Raphmedia 9y ago
> 40-50 Indian rupees (~70 cents) Ha! They sold for CAD$15 around here...
- georgebarnett 9y ago
  They were selling for $10 AU here and somehow 3 weeks later I got one for free because the craze was dead and somebody has excess stock. Being patient pays off so often.
- cakedoggie 9y ago
  I bet they were also selling for CAD$2 if you go to the right place.
- kalleboo 9y ago
  I just saw one, with built-in LED lights and a bluetooth speaker(!) on banggood for $1 with free international shipping.
okreallywtf 9y ago
This reminds me of the great (I think) star trek TNG episode The Game (I had to look up the name, then felt silly). I imagine you and your wife picking them up just to be able to make it home without being accosted.
- samstave 9y ago
  Is that the one where Wesley gets addicted and they basically have to do an intervention on him?

jonny_eh 9y ago

Not all fads are the same. Some are genuinely interesting product lines that just happen to start as a fad, but stick around (Beanie Babies, video games, and Magic: The Gathering). Others are just fads with no legs (Fidget Spinners, Slap Bracelets, and Cabbage Patch Dolls).

HaloZero 9y ago
Why does Beanie Babies stay around vs Cabbage Patch Dolls? I imagine that's because the marketing and other mechanisms for popularity they mention in the article.
downrightmike 9y ago
They had to ban slap bracelets because the cheap knock offs weren't sanded down and ended up being sharp pieces of tape measures tape.
- jonny_eh 9y ago
  The first prototype was built using measuring tape: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/you-have-to-invent-something-season-5-episode-1/ https://gimletmedia.com/episode/you-have-to-invent-something...

themark 9y ago

"disintermediation" I believe this is how an IYI says "cut out the middle man".

theothermkn 9y ago
It may be. It might also be the term that economists use when they talk to each other, to avoid having to go to "Cut Out the Middle Man Conference 2017." Just because someone isn't using a colloquialism doesn't mean they're pretending to be an intellectual.
- themark 9y ago
  Is there really a conference about transitioning to direct sales?
crikli 9y ago
What does "IYI" mean?
- theothermkn 9y ago
  Google tells me "Intellectual Yet Idiot." The #iamverysmart police seem to need new cover, IMO.
  - crikli 9y ago
    Thanks! For some reason that didn't come up, all I got was an urban dictionary reference that didn't seem in context. Wonder of this article is the source? https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577 https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e...
- r1chard5mith 9y ago
  I think the term was coined by Nassim Taleb https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577 https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e...

theothermkn 9y ago

It's hard to put my finger on what exactly unsettled me about the fidget spinner craze, but it seems related to this article. All the hype seemed ad hoc. For Beanie Babies, in retrospect, it felt like a coordinated center (the manufacturer/importer and its marketing arm) surrounded by a bunch of people jumping on the bandwagon. Fidget spinners just felt like every click-baiting view-monger jumping in with their hot take. There seemed to be, from the outside, no central brand or centralized messaging. The closest thing to the latter seemed to be the urban legend that these things were good for ADHD, somehow. Even Baudrillard's hyper-reality seemed to be orchestrated from a center; his assertion that the Europe experience at Disney World was "more real" than Europe itself at least required Disney to have built it. Spinners just arose out of the background radiation, with no apparent proximal cause.

kobeya 9y ago
Someone, somewhere created the first fidget spinner, named it, and marketed it. The fact that you do t know their name maybe just means they did a better job of staying out of the limelight while still profiting from the craze.
- TheSoftwareGuy 9y ago
  There is also the (perhaps more likely) possibility that all three of Thise things were done by different people. For example the creator makes it and shows it to a few friends, maybe posts pics/vids on the internet. Someone else sees the object and names it the fidget spinner. A third person markets it and begins selling them
- smacktoward 9y ago
  Why do you assume the original inventor profited from it? It seems at least as likely that they got left in the dust when someone else noticed the potential in their idea and grabbed it -- especially if the main driver behind the craze were Chinese manufacturers, who are not exactly known for their scrupulous respect for intellectual property...
- DanBC 9y ago

vosper 9y ago

I'm confused... she sold tens of thousands of dollars of fidget spinners, getting on that craze immediately that she heard about it (she had product within 5 days) and knowing that it was a fad that was destined to die out (hardly the first... I remember Tamagotchi's pretty well, and the apparently New Zealand-only Chatter Ring). I don't think the comparison to TripAdvisor and travel agents is particularly strong, and I think you'd be hard pushed to make the case that thousands of travel agents who'd maybe heard something about the place you wanted to go is better than thousands of reviews and photos from people who've actually been there. TipAdvisor has lots of problems, to be sure, but it's still better than travel agents. Unrelated to the above, I'm actually excited for the craze to die out. I think I might be one of the people fidget spinners were originally made for. I don't have any problems focusing, but I habitually spin things in my fingers - my iPhone, my wallet (I've worn marks into the leather), pens... It's usually completely unconscious. So I'll be looking forward to trying a fidget spinner once the fad has gone away.

gknoy 9y ago
> I'll be looking forward to trying a fidget spinner once the fad has gone away. If you feel it would be beneficial to try it, why wait until the fad dies before trying one? This seems like it might be an optimal time to have the maximum breadth of choices to find the one(s) you find most helpful.
- paulgb 9y ago
  And the prices have been dropping. My girlfriend got me one recently and I do find it good for keeping me focused if I'm reading or watching something.
yesiamyourdad 9y ago
> I don't think the comparison to TripAdvisor and travel agents is particularly strong, and I think you'd be hard pushed to make the case that thousands of travel agents who'd maybe heard something about the place you wanted to go is better than thousands of reviews and photos from people who've actually been there. TipAdvisor has lots of problems, to be sure, but it's still better than travel agents. Do you remember what it was like using a travel agent? That's not what travel agents did. They didn't "maybe hear about a place", they actually went there. Resorts & cruises spent a ton of their marketing dollars to bring travel agents to the resort and get them to experience it first hand.

patorjk 9y ago

> ‘‘Now, in less than half a year, spinners are done,’’ Osborne says. ‘‘I’m moving on to squishies’’ — squishable toys that are also (questionably) marketed as attention aids. ‘‘I think they’ll last at least a few months.’’ As a side note, squishies have been around for a while too, at least since last year. My son is a big fan of them. I'm pretty sure he learned about them from YouTube kids, which sometimes seems like trove of toy commercials. Unlike what Ms. Osborne seems to think, I don't think fads in the future will be any shorter, I think they'll just be created in different ways.

rconti 9y ago
In the late 80s or early 90s there was a stress reliever squishy thing that was pink and had some odd shape.. I want to say like a brain or something. And of course stress balls have been trade show junk for decades.

graphememes 9y ago

Same thing happens with twitter lynch mobs. Another day, another victim.

tinus_hn 9y ago

I'm not sure a simple fad like the fidget spinner that explodes out of nowhere is the same as a meticulously marketed toy line.

Giorgi 9y ago

I think it started on Reddit, someone posted some gif, others asked what it was, and after several months we had craze going on our hands. I remember specifically how I checked if any Chinese manufacturers where producing it by that time - none. In fact, item in post on reddit was done on some CNC machine. then all the small-scale importers got on it. These days, it's really easy to move and market your own product small-scale. I think all other fads will follow this fate - lot's of suppliers, rarely any brandname.

lbotos 9y ago
I mean we saw the same thing with "hoverboards" right? There was never a "branded" one, just a bunch of Chinese manufacturer brands.

XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago

> As Osborne learned when she started selling Beanie Babies, middlemen like Joyce are often the ones who turn a fad into a sustainable business that creates jobs. So the NYT is saying that beanie babies were a sustainable business that creates the ever elusive "jobs". It was sustainable in that it lasted longer, but beanie babies are not still a sustainable business. If the metric of success is ~7 years of business then Maddoff was running a sustainable business.

alanh 9y ago

boo fucking hoo. something happened without a central corporation planning and profiting from a wave of upset parents unable to get a worthless item that would make their kid cool for a week? seriously, where is the problem?

jliptzin 9y ago

"Well managed" meaning artificially restricting the supply to create scarcity and inflate prices? As for disintermediation, there's still plenty of room for travel agents and the like to add value. Sure travelocity, tripadvisor etc exist, but for higher end clients who don't want/can't afford to waste time sifting through pages and pages of data/reviews from anonymous internet people, they can hire someone with experience to do all that, or perhaps someone who has built a reputation of recommending excellent itineraries all around the world. Otherwise, it's nice to have the option to do it yourself much more cheaply and efficiently. That money saved by not hiring an agent can now be put into the vacation package for better airfare, lodging, restaurants, etc. The money and jobs don't just disappear, they go elsewhere.

rconti 9y ago
Yup, and as usual, a few folks were winners in the beanie baby craze, and the same goes for the travel industry. I can't see a single thing these "middlemen" create in the travel industry that's desirable for the consumer. I'm sorry, I don't need a travel agent to tell me how to find a cool, hip destination overrun with everyone else the travel industry is sending there. They probably sell fidget spinners at the arrivals area, anyway.

bitwize 9y ago

This week on Hackernews: criticizing big companies for turning toy crazes into huge profits. Last week on Hackernews: a paean to Wham-O, manufacturers of the hula hoop.