The Fidget Spinner Craze Explained Through Cascades
In spring of 2017, a “spinning piece of plastic” took the country’s toy industry by storm. Retailers such as Walmart and Target could hardly keep up with the skyrocketing demands for it. Social media was flooded with countless of Youtube videos and Instagram posts dedicated to it. Schools across the nation have taken measures to ban it. Yet, people cannot seem to stop fidgeting.
Lisa Fickenscher from the New York Post reveals that, “At Midtown Manhattan-based Almar Sales Co., the sales team sold an astounding 20 million fidget toys to Walmart, Toys ’R’ Us, Party City and others in April, executive vice president Allen Ashkenazie told The Post.
“At this rate, it would be our largest-selling toy in our 50-plus-year history,” said Ashkenazie”
Why have they become so popular? In an article from Forbes, Bruce Y. Lee writes, “Everyone fidgets… Whether it’s touching your hair, biting your nails, playing with your clothing or spinning pens in your hands, you probably fidget many, many times a day. Herein lies the reason why the fidget spinner has become the latest toy craze among children..and even adults.” While another article from the Financial Times argues that, “Unlike previous consumer fads, the fidget spinners craze sprang up in the bowels of the internet… The buzz surrounding fidget spinners also highlights the newfound power of YouTube and Instagram over traditional corporate marketing schemes.”
The answer most likely combines these viewpoints and ultimately has to do with how behavior cascades in networks, specifically how new innovations (practices, opinions, conventions, and technologies) diffuse through populations. In class we learned that this “person-to-person influence is primarily due to to informational effects: as people observe the decisions of their network neighbors, they obtain indirect information that leads them to try the innovation as well.” Whether it was by word of mouth in elementary school playgrounds, or through Youtube videos watched during study breaks, the fidget spinner’s success attests to the power of cascades.
Hopefully this fad will soon come to pass. We also learned in class about the fragility of cascades. Meaning that, while they may be “easy” to start they are also “easy” to end. Like rubik’s cubes, webkinz, silly bandz, and tamagotchis, the fidget spinner will probably end up forgotten in shoebox, while the next big toy sensation comes to take over.
Referenced articles:
https://www.ft.com/content/5ead667c-3c0a-11e7-821a-6027b8a20f23
https://nypost.com/2017/04/27/the-hottest-new-toy-fad-is-a-spinning-piece-of-plastic/